Virginia is making national headlines in the race for the White House.
Presidential Candidate Rick Perry is fighting to get his name on the ballot for the state's Republican Primary. Today he filed an emergency injunction to stop ballots without his name from being printed.
Both Perry and Newt Gingrich failed to get enough signatures and now come calls to change state law. Perry filed a lawsuit Tuesday saying that violates his civil rights.
Chris Walters is chair of the Roanoke Republicans Committee and says voters may be disenfranchised if popular candidates are left off the ballot. Perry won a Roanoke County GOP straw poll in August and Gingrich led multiple statewide polls earlier this month.
"I certainly share in the frustration that many of our citizens feel in that someone who is obviously polling so well won't have the opportunity to receive the votes of our citizens," he says.
Any lawsuit may be tough to get resolved before the March primary. What could happen is rushed legislation in the General Assembly to change the law to lower the number of voters required on a petition. It's something Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli supports as well as some politcal groups support.
It simply requires both parties to recognize they've got a problem and fix it with some relatively simple legislation," says Bill Pascoe, executive vice-president of Citizens for the Republic, a non-profit conservative lobbying organization.
Governor McDonnell has said he doesn't want the law to change and that the rules were well known.
The only two candidates on Virginia's primary ballot as it stands are Texas Congressman Ron Paul and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
