Bachmann, Santorum have no delegates on Tennessee primary ballot

The Knoxville Newsreported on Friday that four out of the nine Republican presidential candidates have no committed delegates on the March 6 primary ballot.

The four are Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Gary Johnson, and Buddy Roemer, while Jon Huntsman has only three potential delegates pledged to him. Under Tennessee's complicated system of delegate selection, this does not make it impossible for these five to secure any delegates, but it does make it harder for them to do well.

"I do think it shows a certain amount of organization on the part of the candidates who have gotten a good number of delegate candidates to run," Tennessee Republican Chairman Chris Devaney told the News. "That certainly shows there's a level of organization and that they're thinking beyond the early primaries."

Tennessee provides for 41 Republican delegates to be chosen by primary voters, three in each congressional distract and another 14 as the result of statewide totals. Mitt Romney is the only candidate with more than enough potential delegates on the ballot to fill all 41 slots if he were to win overwhelmingly across the state.

Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry also have a "substantial" number of committed delegates, according to the News. Perry, for example, could potentially take as many as 27 delegates.

Unlike the situation in Virginia, where both Gingrich and Perry failed to obtain the necessary total of 10,000 signatures to be on the ballot, Tennessee asks only for each potential delegate to submit a qualifying petition with 100 signatures. Even under that easier standard, however, "a couple of prospective Gingrich delegates fell just short — in one case, apparently by a single signature."

Photo by IowaPolitics.com (Republicans Debate) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons