CHEYENNE - Imagine trying to get 36,868 people to sign a petition.

They all have to be registered to vote in Wyoming, which has less than 250,000 registered voters. You need to include 15 percent of the voters in each of at least 16 counties. And all of your helpers are unpaid volunteers, just like you.

Welcome to Wyoming's process for placing an initiative or referendum on the ballot.

"Wyoming is the toughest state in the United States to get an initiative on the ballot," said state Rep. Ann Robinson, D-Casper, who has spent the past few months becoming intimately familiar with that process.

Robinson is spearheading an effort to let voters statewide decide whether they should have to keep paying sales tax on grocery purchases.

To start, she needed two other "main sponsors" for the initiative. Those people are former state legislator Kenilynn Zanetti of Rock Springs and John Millin, a Cheyenne eye doctor.

Zanetti sponsored bills to remove the sales tax from food when she was in the statehouse, as has Robinson for the past several years.

To start, the main sponsors needed 100 additional sponsors, all of whom are registered Wyoming voters. They submitted 155 signatures to the secretary of state's office, which rejected 12 of the first 100 names on the list, Robinson reports.

She said one of the rejected names was that of Wyoming Democratic Party Director Kyle DeBeer, who does not use a space in the middle of his last name. But the system had DeBeer's name spelled with a space, so it didn't count.

"The system they use doesn't work very well," Robinson said. "It kind of opened my eyes to why they have a problem verifying the number of signatures that you need."

State Elections Director Peggy Nighswonger said part of the problem is that each county uses its own voter registration system, and counties send that information to the state in a variety of formats.

But that system is currently being replaced for a new $8.5 million system that will make sure the state and all 23 counties have a uniform system, one of the requirements of the federal Help America Vote Act, Nighswonger said.

She said the new system, expected to be in place by Jan. 1, will clear up issues of spaces or apostrophes in last names as well as abbreviations in addresses.

Meanwhile, Nighswonger said the reason many signatures are not accepted is because the people in question aren't registered to vote, or they have moved but haven't changed their address with their county clerks, or they sign a petition multiple times.

Robinson, Zanetti and Millin have been busy recruiting volunteer "circulators" to collect the signatures that will count toward the 36,868 needed to get the issue on the ballot.

"I'm still in the process of getting people set up in each county," Robinson said, and she is also trying to get permission from post offices and large grocery store chains to collect signatures on their properties.

She said she now has about 300 circulators, including Hubert Townsend of Casper. Townsend, a Libertarian, ran unsuccessfully for a legislative seat last year, and removing the sales tax from food was one of the issues in his campaign platform.

When he found out about Robinson's quest to get the issue on the ballot, he gave her a call and offered to help.

He has collected about 150 signatures so far by sitting at a table outside a grocery store under a sign that says, "Axe the tax," which he said has generated interest.

"I get a lot of out-of-state people saying, 'I can't believe that you have a sales tax on food," Townsend said.

Townsend, like all other circulators working on the initiative, is an unpaid volunteer. All must have lived in Wyoming for at least 90 days before they can collect signatures.

Circulators use official packets from the secretary of state's office to gather signatures. Each packet will accommodate 100 signatures, and if even one staple is removed, the signatures in the packet will not count.

Despite the obstacles, Robinson is optimistic that she and other volunteers will gather the needed signatures by the Feb. 13 deadline needed to get the measure on the 2006 general election ballot.

"I truly believe we will," she said.

For now, though, Robinson said she doesn't know how many signatures volunteers may have collected to date. The petition drive is still in its organizational stages, she said, and she has asked them to report to her at the end of July and then each month after that.

If the sponsors don't meet the Feb. 13 deadline, they will have close to another year to collect the needed signatures, but then the issue wouldn't appear on ballots until 2008.

Capital bureau reporter Bill Luckett can be reached at (307) 632-1244 or at bill.luckett@casperstartribune.net.