Next week, the parasites of participatory democracy will descend upon the New York Board of Elections with the aim of keeping aspiring candidates off the fall ballot. It’s an old game, handed down from the Tammany Hall days, where party-hack lawyers contest the signatures of registered voters collected by political challengers of those already in power. Using the wrong color ink, an incorrect size of paper, listing the wrong election district, or forgetting to write the relevant borough at the bottom of each page are among the sins that can get a signature disqualified and a would-be candidate thrown off the ballot.

It’s an essentially corrupt system that dirties everyone who comes in contact with it. But because it works fine for those already in office, there is little incentive for legislative action. That doesn’t mean, however, there isn’t an urgent and obvious need for reform. Mayor Bloomberg has long been an advocate for election reform that would open the process and level the playing field, such as nonpartisan elections. Last fall, he blasted the expensive charade surrounding ballot requirements, saying, “I think it’s time to end this ‘gotcha’ kind of technique where lawyers comb petitions to find some technical violation.”

A noble sentiment, but the dirty realities of New York politics seem to have gotten the better of our mayor’s best instincts. Already six political operatives have challenged the signatures of former Queens Republican Council member Thomas Ognibene on Mr. Bloomberg’s behalf.

Mr. Ognibene received more than 8,000 signatures in his attempt to challenge the mayor in the Republican primary – just over the 7,500 that is required, but well below the “double-or-nothing” threshold usually needed to withstand challenges. Mr. Ognibene has been a staunch partisan in petitioning ballots in the past, but in a phone interview with me, Mr. Ognibene questioned the individuals who filed objections on Mr. Bloomberg’s behalf. One challenger, Jayson Lefer, has asserted he voted in Westbury, N.Y. in 2004. On July 14, according to the Board of Elections, he registered to vote in Brooklyn. Four days later, his challenges were received. While tradition, if not law, usually dictates that challengers are from the same party as the candidate they are contesting, photocopies of anti-Ognibene challenger Mireya Giraldo’s voter-registration form examined by The New York Sun’s Hana Alberts show that Ms. Giraldo is a registered Democrat. It is reasonable to wonder why the Bloomberg campaign could not find registered Republicans to fill this role.

Potentially most serious is Mr. Ognibene’s charge that another objector, Karen Chen, appears not to be a New York resident at all – filing a nonexistent address in Brooklyn and offering a Bloomberg campaign fax machine as her contact number. Ms. Alberts’s examination of signatures on the voter-registration forms for all 15 Karen Chens in New York City shows no match to the signature penned on the elusive Karen Chen’s objector form. Nor does the nonexistent address listed on that form approximate any of the addresses on record with the Board of Elections for the 15 registered Karen Chens. The Bloomberg campaign asserts that Ms. Chen is a volunteer and the objection has been dropped due to an incorrect address, but Mr. Ognibene told me, “If they invented somebody for the purpose of filing challenges, then we’ll have to bring it to the attention of the district attorney.”

It would not be the first time that ghosts have been employed to play dirty political pool in local politics. In 2003, the signatures of City Council member Alan Gerson included one Elsie Roloan, who died on June 22 of that year but nonetheless managed to sign Gerson’s petition four days later. After City Councilman James Davis was murdered in City Hall, his lawyers still challenged his opponent Anthony Herbert’s signatures, causing Mr. Herbert’s lawyer, Victor Bernace, to crack, “Even a dead man can kick you off the ballot in New York.”

Already this year, 235 challenges have been filed against local candidates running for offices ranging from County Committee to City Council and mayor. This legal jousting is a political gutterball, intended to spare incumbents the indignity of having to run in an actual contested election.

I’ve carried petitions for a candidate. The process is painstaking and absurd, designed only to make it as difficult as possible for candidates to appear on the ballot. It is a calculated attempt to block the process of participatory democracy. Moreover, it should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Tammany Hall history of New York politics that the system is effectively rigged to benefit Democrats. The standard of 7,500 signatures is relatively easy for Democratic candidates to achieve with their pool of 2.6 million local registered voters, but Republicans have a far harder time. Even with Mr. Bloomberg’s often-trumpeted 10,000 volunteers and estimated $30 million already spent, his field team was able to submit only 24,000 signatures, 3,000 less than he achieved as a candidate during 2001 and more than 10,000 less than Mayor Giuliani received in his 1997 reelection effort. If a self-funded billionaire incumbent mayor has a hard time collecting signatures, it’s a good sign of how artificially difficult the system is – and it’s even worse for independent candidates, who are required to receive almost twice as many signatures than Democrats and Republicans.

New York State’s system is so byzantine that candidates running for president, including Senator McCain in 2000 and Steve Forbes in 1996, have had to sue to get their names to even appear on the statewide Republican primary ballot, against the wishes of local party kingmakers who wanted voters to rubber-stamp their backroom selection. It led Mr. McCain to decry our state’s “Stalinist politics.”

Changing the current law would require action from the state Legislature, or a constitutional convention. Incumbents have little incentive to change a system that serves them well. But in his remaining 17 months, Governor Pataki should try to leave a legacy of election reform in this arena if he hopes to run for higher office. And Mr. Bloomberg should look back at his call for election reform and act accordingly. True, it may go against the grain of the way things are done in New York politics, but that’s why it’s called “leadership.”