She was among several independent and minor-party candidates for statewide offices - governor, lieutenant governor, and U.S. senator - who met the 5 p.m. Monday deadline to file papers.
Other independents filed petitions to run for the U.S. House or the state legislature.
"I needed nearly 10 times the number of signatures that either [Corbett or Onorato] needed," said Rogers, 48, a family lawyer from York. "The system is designed to discourage third parties."
Rogers intends to campaign on what she sees as the unfairness of the law, which she said keeps many good candidates off ballots. She called it "a very bad slap in the face of Pennsylvania voters, who want a choice."
There was nothing new about Rogers' lament. Candidates running on minor-party labels - Green, Constitutional, Reform, and Libertarian, among others - have complained for decades that Pennsylvania elections are stacked against them.
Such candidates have to obtain a number of signatures that is equal to 2 percent of the total votes received by the most popular candidate for statewide office in the previous general election.
For Rogers, that meant getting 2 percent of the 954,065 votes Republican Judy Olson received in her election last year as Superior Court judge.
In other years, the number has been higher.
In 2006, then a Green Party candidate for governor, Rogers was required to collect 67,070 signatures.
That number was determined by the record 3,353,489 votes that Treasurer Bob Casey (now a Democratic U.S. senator) had received in his 2004 reelection campaign.
In 2006, fearing that Rogers and other Green contenders might take votes from their candidates, Democrats went to court to remove them from the ballot on grounds that they didn't have enough valid signatures.
