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It turns out that, in previous elections, the VA Republican Party has not checked the validity of signatures. If a candidate turned in 10,000 signatures it was assumed they were all valid, registered voters, and not forgeries at all.
In other words, theoretically, a team with a list and a bunch of Bics could assemble the 10,000 signatures for Alan Keyes in one pizza night.
If you check the information in ballot access petitions, you will generally be able to nullify a good fifth of them just for being incorrect. Ditto marks are not valid. Illegible signatures are not valid.
If you go further, you can remove another set where people have written their city instead of their polling location, or where they've gotten some aspect of the thing wrong. Go further and you can eliminate people not on the registered voters list, and obvious forgeries and such.
Eventually, if you have a lot of money and work hard at it, you can disallow half of the signatures for various reasons.
The policy for this election was that if you turned in over 15,000 signatures, they would not check them. And that is what Mitt Romney did.
Bonus irony: Rick Perry vetoed legislation to ease Texas's ballot access laws.
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