I am very proud of all the hard work my campaign put into getting over 1,400 petitions signed and turned in to the Supervisor of Elections office before the noon deadline on Monday.  It was an extraordinary effort and I thank everyone who helped out.  I never would have thought it would have been so difficult to gather so many petitions.  I had spent many weekends at local green markets, car shows, baseball and soccer tournaments, and even going door to door to gather the required petitions.  Not only that, I recruited many volunteers and asked everyone I knew in my district to gather some petitions as well.  For this, I am proud and exhausted!  I am also proud to say that I was the only candidate in the district to turn in enough petitions to actually qualify by petition.

Unfortunately, I found out yesterday that over 200 of our petitions did not qualify with the supervisor of elections office for various reasons.  The persons signing the petition either did not live in the district, they were not registered voters, their address, date of birth or signatures were not correct, or some other reason.  We needed to have 1,229 verified petitions and we only had 1,196; 34 petitions short.  So close, but yet so far…

Normally, there is an 8-10% rejection rate.  We had almost 14% rejected.  This is probably due to the fact that we spent more time talking to complete strangers instead of mailing petitions to likely voters.  Certainly we could have paid to have people go out and get signatures, or tried to mail 10,000 petitions to voters with the hopes of getting a 10% return and thus have a lower rejection rate.  But in my mind, that defeats the purpose.  I would not have talked to voters and would not have developed a strong grassroots effort.  One other candidate attempted to do this and still did not get the required number of petitions signed.  Not only a waste of money, but he still did not talk to the voters, and this is why I am so optimistic.

With this being said, I, along with any other candidate, will now have to qualify for the election by paying a fee.  And I will do this and will work even harder to make sure that come election day, I do not fall 34 votes short!  I now have a great data base of likely voters that I can communicate with and hope to encourage to come out and vote for me come November.

Thanks for all the help and encouragement.  And although this is a minor setback, it will not deter me from my goal of winning this election come November.
Talk to you soon.

Dr. Mark Marciano