Texas election officials are making their final checks of voter signatures to determine whether independent candidates for governor Kinky Friedman and Carole Keeton Strayhorn will make the November ballot



State election officials are cross-checking the names to make sure none were duplicated on both petitions. They're also checking to see if the names are on voter registration rolls and to determine whether the voters cast primary ballots, Haywood said. Author, Musician, and candidate for Governor of Texas, Kinky Friedman served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malaysia in the 1960's.

Texas election officials are making their final checks of voter signatures to determine whether independent candidates for governor Kinky Friedman and Carole Keeton Strayhorn will make the November ballot

Texas officials checking Friedman, Strayhorn petitions
KELLEY SHANNON
Associated Press

AUSTIN - Texas election officials are making their final checks of voter signatures to determine whether independent candidates for governor Kinky Friedman and Carole Keeton Strayhorn will make the November ballot.

The Texas Secretary of State's Office hired a private firm, TELA Technologies of Houston, for electronic data entry. The company entered the name and other information, such as county and date of birth, for each person who signed for the independent candidates.

Those electronic documents were due back to the state Monday so that election officials could check the names against in-house voter registration databases, said Scott Haywood, spokesman for the Secretary of State's Office.

"We'll start that process now, starting today," Haywood said Monday morning.

An announcement on whether Strayhorn and Friedman make the ballot could come by Wednesday, he said.

Strayhorn, the Texas comptroller, and Friedman, a musician and writer, each had to gather 45,540 signatures from registered Texas voters who did not cast ballots in the Republican or Democratic primaries this spring.

They turned in their petitions in May.

Strayhorn submitted some 223,000 signatures, and Friedman submitted 169,574.

Both campaigns acknowledged that some signatures probably wouldn't hold up during verification but predicted they would have enough to make the ballot. Republican Gov. Rick Perry and Democrat Chris Bell are the two major party candidates running.

Petition signers could only have their name on one of the independent gubernatorial candidates' petitions.

State election officials are cross-checking the names to make sure none were duplicated on both petitions. They're also checking to see if the names are on voter registration rolls and to determine whether the voters cast primary ballots, Haywood said.

A decision on how each candidate's name would be listed on the ballot would come later, according to Haywood.

Strayhorn wants to be listed as Carole Keeton "Grandma" Strayhorn, saying that's how voters have known her since her successful campaign for comptroller in 1998, when she ran ads calling herself "One Tough Grandma."

Friedman, whose real first name is Richard, has applied to appear on the ballot as Kinky Friedman.

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Kelley Shannon has covered politics and government in Austin since 2000.

When this story was posted in July 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:




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