Pettaway was frustrated that the clerk’s office could not immediately check her signatures when she turned them in Wednesday afternoon and that the clerk's office notified her that she didn't have enough signatures by email. Had she known earlier, Pettaway said she would still have had time to get enough signatures.

“Often when the papers are filed on the day of the deadline and there aren't many more signatures than the minimum requirement, we find that there is some scrambling to try and get additional signatures,” Witzel-Behl said. “This election, we did have a lot of people wait until the last day to file. That makes it difficult.”

Without the valid 200 signatures, Pettaway cannot be on the ballot.

“The numbers of signatures that we need is established by statute, so we don’t, as a clerk's office, have any way around that,” Witzel-Behl said. “That’s a requirement to get your name on the ballot.”

Pettaway said this will not stop her from running for mayor.

“I’m going to run as a write-in candidate. Nothing is going to hold me back,” Pettaway said. “This is my season.”

Mayor Paul Soglin, Satya Rhodes-Conway, Maurice Cheeks, Raj Shukla and Nick Hart are also running for mayor. The clerk’s office has validated their nomination forms.

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