Earlier it was reported that Federal Judge John A. Gibney Jr. ordered the Virginia State Board of Elections to not print nor send out any absentee ballots until Gov. Rick Perry's ballot challenge, emergency motion is heard on Friday, January 13, 2012.Virginia officials immediately asked a Federal appeals court to overturn Judge Gibney's order.
Heritage's The Foundry notices a very interesting portion on page #2 of the ruling (5 page PDF):
The Court finds that there is a strong likelihood that the Court will find the residency requirement for petition circulators to be unconstitutional. The authorities make clear that circulating petitions for candidates is a form of protected speech, and that the Commonwealth has a heavy burden to justify the restriction on speech by showing not only that the limitation achieves a valid state interest but also that the limitation is no broader in scope than necessary to achieve that purpose. As in all strict scrutiny cases, the state has a difficult task to demonstrate the propriety of its limitation on protected speech. For this reason, the Court believes that the plaintiffs have a substantial likelihood of succeeding on the merits, at least on the issue of the validity of the residency requirement.
The residency requirements for petition circulators was a key part of Perry's original suit against Virginia for Ballot access.
While the original lawsuit was filed by Perry, five days ago it was reported that Judge Gibney had granted a motion by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum to join in on the lawsuit for ballot access.
There is a very good chance, from the wording of the ruling itself, that there will be more GOP candidates, than the originally reported two, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, listed on the Virginia, March 6, 2012, primary ballot.
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