Petitioners fell 582 people short of the minimum required to force a vote on a Vicksburg bond issue, City Clerk Walter Osborne said Thursday.

Osborne, directed by state law to verify each name, said 1,202 names of 2,120 on the petition submitted Nov. 4 were found to be invalid. A total of 918 names were deemed valid city voters, while 1,500 were needed.

Names were rejected for a variety of reasons. One pitched was that of Roosevelt Bunch, a former Vicksburg police officer who died in May 2004.

News of the effort failing drew a strong reaction from John Shorter, an organizer and former candidate for mayor. It &#8220reeks of impropriety,” Shorter said.

With others, Shorter, also identified as local NAACP vice president, had mounted the first effort in at least 30 years to put the brakes on a city project. Shorter said when the Mayor and Aldermen unanimously adopted a resolution to borrow $16.9 million that city officials could not be trusted to spend it as they said. He continued that position Thursday.

He also said he doesn’t trust the process that deemed more signatures invalid than valid.

&#8220It was a shock to me,” Shorter said. &#8220Either way you put it, that’s way too many.”

Under set procedures, all names rejected in the verification process will be posted. Any person whose name appears on the rejected list has 10 days to appeal. Nine people had asked for their names to be removed during the verification process.

Bunch was the only person identified to have been dead. Other reasons for disqualification included 83 duplicates and 39 instances of one person signing multiple names. Petitions &#8220must be signed personally by each petitioner,” Osborne said. He invalidated names he deemed clearly signed in sequence.

In total, the largest reason for disqualification was for people who were not found to be registered voters or whose addresses did not match poll books. More than 1,000 names were eliminated for those reasons.

The appeal period closes at 5 p.m. Dec. 11, after which city officials will likely move ahead to borrow the money, spending: