Holtzman campaign facing uphill climb

Future hinges on finding valid signatures among those missing information

Kevin Vaughan And Burt Hubbard, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 8, 2006 at midnight

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Gubernatorial candidate Marc Holtzman's fight to get into the Republican primary may be more difficult than he and his advocates are predicting.

That's because even if he is successful in reinstating every single Republican signature thrown out in the 1st and 7th congressional districts, he'll still fall hundreds of signatures short of the number he needs to get onto the Aug. 8 ballot.

That means the future of his campaign hinges on the ability to find the valid signatures he needs among another 4,239 rejected, those signed by people who didn't list either their party affiliation or their congressional district.

If he fails, the months of campaigning and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent will have been for naught.

"It seems to me that this is a pretty good example of putting the cart before the horse," said Lori Weigel, a partner with Public Opinion Strategies. "And there are some fundamentals in campaign 101 that have to be met. While Holtzman was pretty adept at navigating, at getting on TV and trying to increase his name awareness and all those other things, someone forgot the basics that you have to be on the ballot for any of that to matter."

The task for Holtzman now is to persuade a judge that hundreds of registered Republicans had their signatures improperly rejected by Colorado Secretary of State Gigi Dennis.

Holtzman's campaign manager, Bob Gould, said that on initial examination many of the disputed signatures are legitimate.

"We have rehabilitated, I will say, many," Gould said.

Asked if he was confident that Holtzman ultimately will be able to prove he got the signatures he needed to make it onto the primary ballot, Gould responded with one word:

"Yes."

If he gets there, he'll face Congressman Bob Beauprez in the Aug. 8 primary election, with the winner going up against Democrat Bill Ritter, the former Denver district attorney, in November.

Holtzman had two potential ways to make it onto the ballot: the GOP state assembly and a petition drive.

He failed at the first when he couldn't win the support of 30 percent of the delegates at the state assembly.

That left him only one option: Collect the signatures of 10,500 registered Republicans by May 25, with at least 1,500 of them in each of the state's seven congressional districts.

But Dennis ruled that Holtzman fell 333 signatures short in the 1st District, which basically covers Denver, and 410 signatures short in the 7th District, which includes a wide swath of suburbs wrapping around the city.

A Rocky Mountain News examination of those rejected signatures showed that Holtzman will still be short even if he is successful in having every single Republican signature reinstated in the two congressional districts.

That's because in the 1st District, for example, the rejected signatures included only 157 Republicans. That means that even if all of them are reinstated, Holtzman would still be 176 signatures short in Denver.

Ditto the 7th District. Even if all 133 rejected Republican signatures are reinstated there, Holtzman would still be 277 short.

That's why he must turn to the 4,239 rejected signatures from people who didn't list either their party affiliation or their congressional district.

A Rocky Mountain News examination of that group of signatures showed that Holtzman's campaign faces several different challenges in finding the numbers it needs:

• More than half of those signatures - 2,497 - were from people the Secretary of State's Office could not find in the list of registered voters in its computer system. Some of them may have only recently registered, but others may not ever have registered.

• Another 814 of them were rejected because while they were found on the list of registered voters, their addresses had changed. While this group may be the most likely to be reinstated, 225 of them aren't in either the 1st or 7th districts.

Still, Holtzman's campaign expressed confidence publicly on Wednesday that it will ultimately prevail.

Mark Grueskin, Holtzman's attorney, said discrepancies as simple as a middle initial could be the difference that turns a rejected signature into a valid one.

"That's really a huge field of names that are up in the air," he said of the group of 4,239. "There's a lot of names there, and I anticipate that there will be more than enough to establish candidacy."

Gould, the campaign manager, would not disclose how many valid signatures the campaign believes exist among the 4,239.

Weigel, whose firm has done polling in the past for the News, questioned whether Holtzman turned his attention to the petition drive soon enough.

"He knew that it was going to be very, very difficult to get on the ballot via the convention, so I'm not sure why the focus all along wasn't on petitioning onto the ballot," she said. "Maybe it's an example of trying to cover all the bases and therefore not having someone on first.

"They were worried about someone turning the corner on third and no one was on first base."

District 1

Needs 1,500 valid signatures

• No. certified by secretary of state 1,167

• Number short 333

• Number of Republicans rejected 157

District 7

Needs 1,500 valid signatures

• No. certified by secretary of state 1,090

• Number short 410

• Number of Republicans rejected 133

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