“I went down to the state capitol in New Hampshire,” McCain said at New York University news conference, where he was flanked by his lawyers, Burt Neuborne and Richard Emery, who have a history of taking on civil rights cases. “I handed the Secretary of State a check for — I think it was $500 — I’m on the ballot in New Hampshire.”

Not so in New York, where a Republican presidential candidate is required to collect as many as 890 signatures in each of the state’s 31 congressional districts for two separate petitions — one for delegates and another for the candidate. The rules — which have often played to the advantage of the candidate with the broadest party support — require that each petition be filled out meticulously — if a voter fills in Manhattan instead of New York under county, for example, that form could be invalid. A candidate risks getting knocked off the ballot if there are any errors.

And even if a Republican presidential candidate survives the challenges, the ballot for GOP contenders lists the names of delegates in larger print than the actual presidential candidate — making it difficult for voters to determine who they’re electing.

“We go out in the cold weather, we get the signatures, we survive the challenges and then you have this terrible, terrible process where people don’t know who they’re voting for,” says Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, the McCain campaign’s New York chairman.” It shouldn’t be that way.”

But it is. In fact, the laws in New York have been so byzantine that 1996 was the first year in history that Republicans had a choice between at least two candidates for the Republican nomination for president in all of the state’s congressional districts.

After that year, Steve Forbes, represented by Emery and Neuborne, successfully sued the state for access to the ballot. In the wake of the bad press that followed the Forbes lawsuit, New York Gov. George Pataki promised to rewrite the laws. He did. Candidates now need only a tenth of the signatures they used to.

Still, that’s a half a percent of a district’s registered Republicans, a considerable number of signatures. Full of fire and brimstone, Emery called Pataki and state Republican Party Chairman Bill Powers, who are supporting Texas
Gov. George W. Bush, “commissars in a small Albanian backwater political system. They are restricting the voters from making a choice for what may well turn out to be — and appears to be — the leading Republican candidate for president.” Emery’s comment was a little hyperbolic — McCain is still running a distant second in New York.

Bush supporters haven’t said whether they’ll try to keep McCain off the ballot, but Dan Allen, spokesman for the state Republican Party, defended the new law.

“I find it shocking that Mr. Emery doesn’t believe that Sen. McCain can’t get himself on the ballot. The governor has worked hard to get the laws eased. In one district you only need 82 signatures. It’s surprising to me that Mr. Emery doesn’t think John McCain will be able to do that.”

His lawyers clearly don’t think he can maneuver around all the legal roadblocks by the deadline. But Emery and Neuborne aren’t seeking just to get McCain on the ballot — they’re trying to get the law thrown out altogether, claiming it’s unduly burdensome.

“The New York primary, because of the fact that its on March 7, increases in importance in this process we’re going through,” McCain said Thursday. “Every pundit I know says the nomination will be decided that day because you have California, New York and 13 other states who will hold their primary on the same day.” If McCain is unable to secure a position on the ballot, that decision just might be a foregone conclusion.

A victory in the courts may be McCain’s only chance to steal some of New York’s 101 delegates to the Republican National Convention — the third largest delegation in the nation — from front-runner George W. Bush.

Without them, a victory in New Hampshire — which now seems well within reach — may be a pyrrhic, indeed.

Comparing addresses with a pink-bound printout from the Board of Elections, Peters, a veteran whose day job is captain of the Staten Island Ferry, was bounding up stoops and ringing on door bells. Bell No. 1: No answer. Bell No. 2: Mommy doesn’t speak English. Bell No. 3: No answer. Bell No. 4: Daddy’s not in. Bell No. 5: A hit!

Peters utters a name from his list of registered Republicans. “That you?” he asks. “Mmm hmm” comes the reply. “My name is Frank Peters. I’m with the McCain campaign. We’re trying to collect signatures to get him on the ballot.”

The door is pushed shut. “No thank you.”

Finally, at bell No. 6, Peters gets a yes, from a woman who knows him from work. She escorts him to a neighbor’s home, where he gets two more signatures.

After half a hour, Peters has three signatures to show for his efforts. More than 500 are needed in this congressional district alone. And this effort must be repeated in each of New York’s 31 congressional districts.

For the next month, the streets of New york will be peppered with people like Peters, waging an uphill battle to get McCain on the ballot in New York.

More than 40 percent of all election lawsuits in the country are filed in New York, political consultants say, because the state’s election law is so Byzantine. Despite rule changes after the 1996 presidential race that ostensibly eased ballot access, it’s still harder to get on the ballot in this state than in any other state in the country, with the possible exception of Virginia. Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who has the backing of New York Gov. George Pataki and the state Republican Party, with its army of experienced signature gatherers, will certainly get a spot. So will publisher Steve Forbes, who can dip into his seemingly limitless financial resources. But McCain, with sparse funds and a rag-tag group of inexperienced volunteers, might not make it.

“It will be tough, tough, tough,” to get on the ballot in New York, acknowledges Mosbacher. So can McCain win without a portion of New York’s 101 Republican delegates? “It will be tough, tough, tough.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

In 1996, former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato put the vast resources of the Republican machine to work for his chosen candidate, former Sen. Bob Dole. Then it was even harder to get Republicans on the ballot. You had to collect valid signatures from 5 percent of Republicans in each congressional district. Valid meant the full name signed exactly at it appeared on a voter registration form. The correct assembly district and election district had to be entered for each voter. The proper county. “New York” not “Manhattan.” “Kings” not “Brooklyn.” And it all had to be in blue or black ball-point pen. Petitions had to be submitted bound in a certain way, with carefully entered tallies. Getting any of this wrong could result in having a candidate knocked off the ballot.

But then two things happened. Steve Forbes, represented by civil rights attorney Richard Emery, went to federal court to defend his petitions and won, opening up the ballot for himself and Pat Buchanan. And the relentless bad press that D’Amato and Pataki got for trying to prevent New York Republicans from choosing among presidential candidates caused D’Amato to admit he’d made a mistake and the governor to promise to rewrite the law.

And he did.

Under current law, you only need half a percent of a district’s registered Republicans to get on the ballot. That ranges from 89 in Major Owen’s congressional district in central Brooklyn to 890 in John Sweeney’s in the capitol region, which includes Republican-rich areas like Saratoga County. You don’t need to put the election district or the assembly district.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. “They’ve eliminated some of the minutia, but its still a very time consuming process,” says Gerry O’Brien, McCain’s New York political director. “There are other states like New Jersey where to get on the ballot you just have to collect 2,000 signatures. There’s no district-by-district or house-to-house fight. In other states you simply post a bond with the secretary of state or the government for $500 or $1,000 and you’re automatically on the ballot.”

In New York you still have to run 31 separate petitioning operations. You still have to use blue or black ball-point pens. You still have to put “New York” county, not “Manhattan.” And if someone accidentally puts yesterday’s date on a petition after 12 people have put today’s date, the entire petition is tossed out.

“The requirements that the election lawyers pick over like carrion in the desert are just incredible,” says Emery. “Judges throw these petitions out for the most minute reasons. Petitions have to be folded in certain ways and signed in certain ways and the verifications have to be done in certain ways and unless thing are done virtually perfectly you can be denied access to the ballot.”

Proponents of the new rules say they’re designed to make sure only credible candidates with some voter support get on the ballot. It would be hard to argue that McCain, who is running second in the polls in New York, doesn’t easily clear both those hurdles, but his supporters are still worried.

Guy Molinari, who has successfully installed members of Congress (and former members of Congress, including his own daughter, Susan) and other elected officials is no political slouch, but his support for McCain came late and only after a bitter falling out with Gov. Pataki over a list of grievances, including Pataki’s late and lukewarm support of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s likely U.S. Senate campaign bid and the governor’s reluctance to grant clemency to a police officer convicted of an illegal search in pursuit of a stolen police radio. (The clemency offer eventually came.) Still, Molinari aside, McCain has almost no political pros on his side in New York, and the college students and veterans that make up his ground troops may not be savvy enough to overcome the hurdles.

So far, the other camps aren’t saying much about their plans, if any, to try to knock McCain off the ballot. (Unchallenged petitions are simply certified.) Jeff Buley, a lawyer for the state GOP (who, as counsel to the New York Senate in 1996, helped write the current law) says “right now the plan of the Bush campaign is not to wage an all-out offensive in terms of qualifying for the ballot — they intend to win at the polls.” But he adds: “They will make sure the petitions are legitimate.”

The McCain people say they’re more worried about Forbes, who was the one who helped open up this process in the first place. Bill Dal Col, Forbes’ campaign manager, insists his team is in favor of ballot access for all. “If anything, we think New York should come into line with the other states. The czars of new York still want to rule who be on the ballot.” So, then, the Forbes campaign won’t be challenging McCain’s petitions? “I didn’t say that!” he parries. “It depends on if they challenge our petitions. I would expect the Bush people would be doing that.”

By the time the 1996 primary came around, Dole had won enough states to make it pretty clear he was going to be the nominee, and he won handily in New York, even with Forbes on the ballot in 31 congressional districts and Buchanan on the ballot in 23. That year, New York voters got to choose among three Republicans.

This year, even with the looser rules, they may not.

No, he did not concede defeat in that election, the one where he is going up against Hillary Rodham Clinton to succeed Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. That election is a year away.

But Giuliani managed, by pushing a package of revisions of New York’s charter — the city’s constitution — to make the election of 1999 a referendum on his legacy. The result: 74 percent of voters rejected his charter revision proposal, 26 percent supported it.

And it just so happened that the very coalition that will be supporting Clinton next year — the state’s labor unions and its leading Democratic elected officials — had an awful lot to do with that defeat. The first lady herself didn’t lift a finger, didn’t speak about charter change, didn’t deploy any staff or volunteer time on the measure. But many scored this early electoral skirmish Hillary 1, Rudy 0.

It all started in the spring, when Giuliani appointed a commission with the express mandate of changing the rules of mayoral succession. In New York, the public advocate — which is to government what the appendix is to the body: a useless organ that tends to go unnoticed except when it causes pain — takes over if the mayor leaves office before his elected term is over. But the current holder of the public advocate’s office, Mark Green, a former Nader-raider, tends to goad the mayor frequently on issues like police brutality and consumer protection.

Green represents all that the mayor has derided as the left-wing, defeatist ideology that ran the city in the bad old days — which was apparently the city’s entire history before Giuliani was elected mayor.

The initial idea of the commission, chaired by Giuliani’s former deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, was to change the charter to require a special election if Giuliani left office early, that is, say, if he were elected senator in 2000.

But even though most good-government groups, including Common Cause, the Bar Association, and the League of Women Voters (known in this city as the goo-goos) usually think elections are a good idea, they cried foul at the attempt by the mayor to tinker with the charter for his own personal revenge.

By the end of the summer, the commission, which met briefly in generally inaccessible locations around the city, had backed off some. It proposed requiring a special election if a mayor left office before finishing his or her term, but to take effect in 2002, so it wouldn’t involve the Giuliani senate race. The commission came up with another 13 proposals that did everything from the benign — require trigger locks on guns — to the controversial — require the city to sock away budget surpluses for a rainy day (instead of, say, spending them on raises for city workers).

The goo-goos were still in a tizzy.

The mayor saw a chance to use charter reform to promote what he calls the positive changes he’s made in the city — lowering crime, improving the quality of life, responsible fiscal management. And in the process, he helped make the charter-reform election a mandate on his time in office.

Ten days before the election, a flier hit voters’ mailboxes. Next to a large picture of the mayor, it said: “Our proposed charter reforms are about our children’s future.” The next day, Giuliani did what he’s always done when he has a major campaign-style policy address to deliver: He gave a speech at the Sheraton Hotel — on charter reform.

“Let’s take the things that have happened in city government that have been positive things, that have helped propel the city in a very, very good direction and let’s make them permanent,” the mayor said.

This just happens to be exactly the kind of language you might find if you visited the mayor’s Senate campaign Web site — but it was paid for with $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars, because, commission chairman Mastro said, the commission had a “legal mandate” to “educate” voters. And the 1989 charter reform commission had spent $1 million on advertising, so there was precedent.

But like any well-run media effort in a low-turnout race, the first flier was just one in a wave of communications with voters. On Wednesday, voters got another brochure from the charter commission, headlined “keeping our city’s progress going into the next century.”

On Friday, yet another mailer hit, this one calling itself a “supplement to the campaign finance board’s voter guide.” Now, the CFB is a nonpartisan agency in the city, and it tends to take seriously its role of publishing balanced guides and enforcing the city’s campaign finance laws. It mailed out a 63-page guide that published the full text of the ballot measure and listed pros and cons. The revision commission’s “supplement” contained a full side of an 8-by-14-inch flier of letters in support, and one sixth of a side had statements in opposition.

Nor was that all. There were 14-page inserts distributed in the New York Daily News and the Staten Island Advance, and ads in the New York Times and weekly newspapers. The mayor’s political action committees spent $110,000 on telephone messages from the mayor urging voters to back charter change.

The goo-goos again, were going nuts. “‘All about the future of the city’s children’ — you can’t tell me that’s education! It’s advocacy, it’s political sloganeering,” said Gene Russianoff, senior attorney at the New York Public Interest Research Group and a major agitator against charter reform.

But Giuliani wasn’t the only one dipping into taxpayer funds to make a political point. City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, a Democrat, spent $135,000 on two mailings to “likely voters” urging a “no” vote, according to Vallone spokesman Mike Clendendin. Just why the City Council maintains a list of who likely voters are, Clendendin didn’t say. Mark Green also dipped into taxpayer coffers, to the tune of $15,000, to mail out a newsletter with a significant portion devoted to discussing charter change.

But these relatively feeble advertising efforts were just the visible elements of the Democrats’ campaign. A top aide to Green, Richard Schrader, took a leave from his city job and camped out in the offices of the newly minted Working Families Party, and organized political clubs to fight the proposal. Unions, furious over the budgetary provisions in the charter-reform proposal and just plain mad at the mayor for keeping pay raises down for years, did their own focus groups, mailed out their own flier, but mostly made hundreds of thousands of phone calls and fielded an army of 1,000 volunteers on a miserably rainy, blustery Election
Day.

These are the very people — the teachers union, the municipal workers union, the hospital workers union — who have pledged their support to Clinton, before she’s even made her candidacy official.

But it was Giuliani’s own taped phone calls, in a city going a little sour on his take-no-prisoners style (and on the heels of a judicial drubbing about his attempt to withdraw city funds from the Brooklyn Museum over a controversial art exhibit that features a dung-spattered Virgin Mary) that may have gotten many of the no voters to the polls.

The calls were made to Democratic neighborhoods that had supported the mayor, but this time residents weren’t buying it. On Election Day, voter after voter at Giuliani’s own polling site on the Upper East Side said the phone call from the mayor had reminded them to come out and vote “no.” In the end, 281,265 New Yorkers voted against charter change. Only 90,838 voted for it.

The day after the election, most all the state’s top Democrats — state Comptroller H. Carl McCall, and Green, and Vallone, and what seemed like most of the City Council, gathered in front of City Hall to gloat over their victory. Said Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, who, like Green and Vallone, wants to be succeed Giuliani: “This is the first sign of Giuliani fatigue.”

Maybe. Giuliani is famous for making endorsements that backfire — backing former Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo over George Pataki was his biggest miscall — but great at winning his own elections. Said Republican consultant Joseph Mercurio: “Even though voters are willing to elect [the mayor], and by large margins, and even though he’s ahead in the Senate race, [they said] this time we’re not with you, but we’ll be with you next time.”

There’s evidence for that. A New York Times poll taken in March had Clinton nine points ahead of the mayor. This week, she was four points behind. (The Times called this a “statistical dead heat.”)

But still, as Clinton breezed into Westchester Wednesday to measure the windows of her Chappaqua home for curtains, her minions were smiling.