But there has been nothing on the scale of the fraudulent signatures here.

He said he also found "clearly fraudulent signatures" supposedly from the same person.

The court said many of the fraudulent signatures had been the work of people who had signed the petitions multiple times.

In March 2005, Mussolini was banned by a local court from regional elections held the following month for presenting fraudulent signatures.

His re-election campaign was fined $277,700 in 2002 for submitting thousands of fraudulent signatures on nominating petitions.

Michigan's 11th congressional district: Thaddeus McCotter: failed to make the ballot for renomination due to fraudulent signatures.

The initiative, along with two others, was removed from the ballot due to fraudulent signature gathering techniques, by a unanimous decision of the Montana Supreme Court.

Mr. Martino also told the court that Mr. Slevin had used a black crayon to strike out apparently fraudulent signatures before submitting them.

Andrey Safonov's candidacy was at first rejected on the basis of insufficient and allegedly fraudulent signatures, but on 30 November the Tiraspol law court accepted it.

The fight has become fierce in Oregon, with anti-Nader forces telling people circulating Nader petitions that they could be jailed and fined if they submitted fraudulent signatures.

VoteOnMarriage.org was accused of employing forgery and bait-and-switch techniques to obtain fraudulent signatures for their petition drive, and the Massachusetts Attorney General initiated a criminal investigation regarding the forgery allegations.

If the courts find that the Conservative Party petitions have many fraudulent signatures, including at least one of a dead person, what does that say about candidates and parties that regularly rail at crime in the streets?

The District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics fined the campaign to re-elect Mayor Anthony A. Williams $277,700 today for submitting thousands of fraudulent signatures on nominating petitions.

Mr. Fujimori's administration was rife with bribe-taking, prosecutors in Lima charge, and his use of fraudulent signatures in the 2000 election helped lead to his downfall when Congress voted him unfit to govern.

"Most people from the outside are appalled by what they hear about the District of Columbia politics," said Dorothy Brizill, the executive director of DCWatch, a watchdog group that helped expose the fraudulent signatures in Mr. Williams's petition.

Alejandro Toledo, the leading presidential opponent of Mr. Fujimori, charged that the National Intelligence Service had orchestrated a fraudulent signature campaign to get Mr. Fujimori on the ballot this spring, then lead a smear and harassment campaign against the opposition.

The F.B.I. said it dismantled a network of forgers that created and sold up to $100 million of bogus memorabilia to fans in 15 states, including 10,000 baseballs with fraudulent signatures from the likes of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Mark McGwire.

New York State Common Cause, the New York Public Interest Research Group and other critics suggest this may be an attempt to tie candidates closer to petitions gathered by their supporters, making it easier to disqualify candidates on the basis of some fraudulent signatures submitted by campaign workers.

The Nader campaign, which hired people to collect signatures, insists that it is the victim and that the fraudulent signatures are the result of sabotage, though it has no evidence beyond a story from one homeless man who said Democrats offered him double the pay the Nader campaign did for signatures.