Guide To Designating Petitions printable pdf download

Guide to Designating Petitions

To begin the election process you must have a certain number of accurate signatures on your

designated petitions, or petitions specifically created for a certain party and position. Please

follow the instructions below to guarantee your petitions are correctly filled out. If you are

running on one of the established parties in NYS (Democrat, Republican, Conservative,

Independence or Working Families), you must file Designating Petitions.

Step 1: Make sure that you are eligible to circulate petitions

One of the easiest ways for your opponent to disqualify your petitions is challenging the

eligibility of the person gathering signatures. To circulate petitions, you must be a registered

member of your political party within the State of New York.

The campaign office can verify your voter registration status or you can do this yourself by

visiting the following website: Do not assume that

this information is up-to-date; everyone should double-check their registration information.

When you check your voter registration, be certain that the party listed is correct and your

address is also correct. This information must match identically to what you fill out on the

“Statement of Witness” of the petition or else the signatures that you gather may not be valid.

Step 2: Get copies of your campaign’s designating petitions and a walking list of voters

in your district

Your campaign office will provide you with the petitions you will use to gather signatures.

Use only the original petitions provided by the campaign office. If you need more copies, ask

the office to supply your with more.

The campaign will also provide you with a walking list of all the registered members of your

party that you will use when gathering signatures. This list should be filtered to include only

the members of your party who voted in the most recent election; this will help ensure that

you are only knocking on the doors of active, recent voters. It is important that you use your

walking list to ensure that you are not overlapping with other petitioners and gathering

duplicate signatures. In addition, using the walking list will ensure that you to only reach out

to eligible voters.

Step 3: Review the rules for gathering signatures.

Before you start gathering signatures, please carefully review the general tips and rules

provided at the end of this document. This will help you prevent commons mistakes that can

disqualify petitions.

Guide To Designating Petitions