A prominent gun control advocate in Virginia whose daughter was fatally shot on live TV failed to receive enough signatures to qualify for his district’s congressional primary.
The absence of Andy Parker, a Democrat running for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, clears the path for Josh Throneburg to reach the general election, as he is the only Democratic candidate who made it onto the primary ballot. Democrats have had their eye on the red district that stretches from Charlottesville to the North Carolina border since Republican Rep. Bob Good secured a victory in 2020, becoming one of the most conservative House members.
“We had a committee of five individuals that reviewed the signatures several times to get to 1,000, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen,” said Patricia Harper-Tunley, the 5th District’s committee chairwoman for the Democratic Party, in a statement.
SEN. WARNOCK HAS OVER $25 MILLION IN THE BANK FOR FIGHT AGAINST GOP RIVAL WALKER
Parker failed to reach the 1,000-voter signature threshold needed to qualify, submitting only 937 valid signatures of 1,093 total, according to the Virginia Democratic Party.
The party typically advises candidates to submit at least 1,500 signatures to account for possibly invalid ones, especially as new congressional maps may lead to confusion about voters’ registrations. Several of the invalid signatures Parker submitted were rejected either because they did not live in the 5th District or because their addresses did not match those the state had on file, the party said.
Taken aback by his failure to qualify, the Virginia Democrat said he plans to conduct a forensic audit and then explore further action.
“We are consulting with an attorney tomorrow to find out what the hell is going on,” Parker said earlier this week. “Josh is jumping the gun with this.”
Parker made national headlines after announcing his candidacy in January, calling himself Big Tech’s “biggest nightmare” as he targeted social media giants after videos of his daughter’s death received millions of views on Facebook and YouTube.
Alison Parker, a broadcast journalist, was conducting an interview near Roanoke, Virginia, when a former coworker shot and killed her and her cameraman on live TV in 2015. The interviewee, Vicki Gardner, was shot but survived.
“I kept asking that the videos be taken down, but the tech companies kept ignoring me. And the videos kept being uploaded, over and over again,” Andy Parker said in a video announcing his candidacy. “Almost seven years later, it’s still happening. Some evil ghouls even made money selling ads around footage of my child’s death. And I cannot let that stand.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
His actions led to a yearslong battle with social media giants to remove the images from the internet, including efforts to turn the video into a nonfungible token, or NFT, to eliminate the footage altogether.
Throneburg will face the winner of the GOP primary on May 21 as Good seeks to defend his seat against Republican Daniel Moy.
