Judge rules against Rick Perry's Virginia ballot suit

Following a hearing in Richmond today, U.S. district judge John Gibney ruled against Rick Perry's challenge to the Virginia ballot rules.

In his opinion, Gibney says Perry, and the other candidates who joined the challenge, waited too long to bring the suit.

"They knew the rules in Virginia many months ago; the limitations on circulators affected them as soon as they began to circulate petitions," he writes. "The plaintiffs could have challenged the Virginia law at that time. Instead, they waited until after the time to gather petitions had ended and they had lost the political battle to be on the ballot; then, on the eve of the printing of absentee ballots, they decided to challenge Virginia's laws. In essence, they played the game, lost, and then complained that the rules were unfair."

The decision means Perry, as well as Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman, will not appear on the ballot in the state's March 6 primary.

Perry and Gingrich failed to qualify for the ballot late last month after filing their signatures with the Virginia State Board of Elections, when the state GOP determined that neither candidate had enough valid signatures to meet the requirements. Only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul qualified to appear on the ballot with the required number of signatures: Huntsman and Santorum did not file at all.

Virginia requires 10,000 signatures from registered voters, including at least 400 signatures from each of the state's congressional districts. The requirements are some of the most stringent in the country.

Perry challenged the constitutionality of the state's ballot access rules in court on Dec. 27, calling them some of the "most onerous in the nation" and asserting that they "severely restrict who may obtain petition signatures."

Gibney, the federal judge, said earlier this week that the case was likely to be decided in Perry's favor, and ordered that the preparation of absentee ballots be halted until a decision was reached. Virginia officials pushed back against Gibney's order, filing an emergency appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit — and Perry's team fired back with a brief urging the appeals court to uphold the order.

UPDATE: Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli responds to the court's decision in a statement: