Ken Cuccinelli collects 12,500 signatures

From Sen. Ken Cuccinelli....

Those who have heard me speak know that I am a man of many words. But today I am (practically) speechless...and very deeply moved.

As you know we have been faced with the requirement of collecting 4,000 petition signatures by today in order to qualify to be on the Republican ballot at the State Convention in May. Assuming that many of the signatures we collect would be disqualified, we aimed to collect 6,000 signatures, in order to ensure that we would have at least 4,000 qualifying signatures. We were given 27 days to collect these signatures. We asked you all to help...and help you did!

More than 250 volunteers spent the last three weeks collecting signatures from friends, neighbors, business associates, church members, club members, and every person on the street willing to sign our petitions.

You all collected over 12,500 original signatures (not copies)! Counting the signatures on the petitions collected by other state-wide candidates who were gracious enough to include our name on their petitions, the total signatures collected, as reported back to me from RPV, are over 22,000! There were so many petitions coming in over the last few days that our campaign staff barely slept over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend because they were up every night sorting petitions and counting signatures!

Just so our volunteers don't think they were being put to work for overkill, as of last Monday, we had less than 3,000 petition signatures delivered to our office, and by the end of the day Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving), we were over 12,000. So, you can see that we had a rush of petitions come in late, the fruit of so many volunteers' efforts all over the Commonwealth. We even got petitions in from people that we had not previously known were out there working for us - one of the wonderful benefits of a strong grassroots campaign.

I cannot possibly express to each of you who helped how very grateful I am for your help! Thank you for the numerous hours spent helping our campaign collect these signatures! Thank you for the incredible show of support and encouragement.

This is an outstanding accomplishment and demonstrates the MASSIVE grassroots advantage that we have over our competitors for the nomination. One of our AG competitors had to completely rely on copies of the Bolling and McDonnell campaigns' petitions while our other competitor turned in a miniscule number of original signatures. In fact, we had more original signatures than any other statewide campaign for any office, and we crushed our AG competitors in this first grassroots contest.

So, I'm not quite speechless. But I am very grateful for the effort of so many of you!

Now let's take this grassroots enthusiasm forward to recruit delegates to the Republican Convention, then get them to Richmond in May, then go on to win the state-wide general election next November.