Perot Dealt Blow in Bid to Put Party on Ballot

SACRAMENTO — Ross Perot’s efforts to qualify a new party for California’s 1996 presidential election suffered a setback Wednesday with news that state officials gave Perot the wrong deadline for filing petitions.

Perot launched a statewide drive last weekend to either register 89,007 voters in his Reform Party or collect signatures of 890,064 registered voters on petitions. The deadline was thought to be Oct. 24 for either approach.

But Secretary of State Bill Jones said Wednesday that the effective deadline for the petition route has passed, but that the Oct. 24 deadline still applies for the voter registration process.

As a result, a spokesman for Perot’s “United We Stand America” organization said the campaign to place the new Reform Party on the 1996 ballot will continue, focusing on the voter registration method.

A Perot spokesman, Leonard Crunelle, operations coordinator for the petition and registration drive, said the new obstacle in deadlines “in no way deters us from getting ballot access in California.

“It always has been that registrations and petitions are parallel activities, so we have a backup,” Crunelle said. “It is business as usual. We’re just going to make it happen. We will get the registrations.”

Jones said the erroneous information about the deadlines came from his office, but he didn’t say how the mistake occurred. He explained that the petition deadline did not take in account “the physical ability to verify and certify this huge number of signatures.”