Once your nominating petition for becoming a candidate in a race has been properly filled out, it is time to give it to a circulator who gets people to sign it. Sometimes the candidate can be a circulator, but not everyone can be a circulator. Most local campaigning election laws have specific requirements for the person who circulates the petition, even if it is the candidate himself.

On most petitions, there is a part for the circulator to fill out, also. For example, after the circulator gets the signatures, he must certify at the end of the petition the number of signatures and that he witnessed each of the voters sign. Sometimes this certification must also be notarized. If the circulator's portion is incorrect, none of the signatures on that part of the petition will be valid. Always check the requirements for circulators.

Even if the political campaign candidate's and the circulator's signatures are proper, some of the individual signatures might be declared invalid. Many of the petition forms we have looked at have a space after the signer's address for the person's resident precinct. This is to help the elections people when they check because they keep the list of registered voters' names by precinct.

In some areas, each part petition can only contain signatures from one precinct to make validation of the names easier. In light of the fact that many elections offices are now fully computerized and names can be checked without reference to the voting precinct, these requirements are archaic, but they are still on the books and still used to trap the unwary. Be sure to check if your state makes having the precinct mandatory, or whatever, because the signature will not be valid without it.

The nominating petition system if you want to run in a Democrat campaign for office is, unfortunately, subject to a lot of abuse (or for any political party, for that matter). Reasonable regulations are adopted to promote democracy and foster efficient elections. It is not unreasonable, for example, to require that a candidate get some voters' names on his petition. After all, if he can't get a few signatures, he is not likely to get any votes and it is a waste of taxpayers' money to have his name on the ballot.

Too often, however, a reasonable regulation in a Democrat campaign is subverted for political purposes. The "Ins" use the law to keep the "Outs" out. In one state, a Democrat or Republican can get on the ballot with 50 signatures on the nominating petition, but a third-party candidate or an Independent needs 250.

To get on the ballot for Judge of the Civil Court of Bronx County, New York, one must obtain signatures from 1 percent of the registered voters, but that means that a Republican needs about 1,500 while a Democrat campaign needs to have about 4,000 names.

Even when some of these roadblocks have been removed, the Ins have resorted to hyper-technical applications of the law to disqualify Democrat campaign candidate petitions. In one case, a candidate had 50 names, just exactly the minimum number of signatures required, but state law allowed a signer to withdraw his name from a petition even after it had been filed. The opposition got one of the signers to withdraw his name, and the candidate's petitions were declared invalid because he had only forty-nine names, one short.