11:55 a.m. - An effort to recall Mandan's mayor and two city commissioners was rejected this morning because of irregularities and insufficiencies in the petitions, city administrator Jim Neubauer said.

"As far as we're concerned today, the recall effort is dead," he said.

An investigation into the attempt to recall Mayor Ken LaMont and commissioners Dan Ulmer and Sandra Tibke determined the petitions submitted by the sponsoring committee were invalid for a number of reasons, Neubauer said.

First, one of the members of the sponsoring committee, Patrick Smiley, had not lived in Mandan long enough to meet the requirements as a qualified elector. That left the committee with four qualified members, one less than the number required by state law.

Also, Neubauer said, several of the petitions are invalid because signed affidavits by petition circulators have proven to be false. Petition circulators must verify that, among other things, each signature is the genuine signature of the person it is purported to be.

"During the course of our phone conversations with many of those whose names appeared on the petitions, we learned that many of them did not sign the petition," Mandan's deputy auditor, Phyllis Hager, said in a printed statement. "In some instances, a person signed his or her own name and that of a spouse or friends."

With the duplicates thrown out, the petitions didn't contain enough signatures to warrant a recall election. The petition to recall each commissioner and the mayor must include the signatures of enough residents to equal 25 percent of the votes cast in the most recent city commission election. This year, that magic number is 492. Only 406 valid signatures were left on the petition to recall LaMont; Ulmer's contained 418 and Tibke's 445.

Neubauer said the city's decision to invalidate the petitions was made after consulting with city attorney Sharon Gallagher and the Secretary of State's Office.

The Bureau of Criminal Investigation has conducted an investigation into this recall process and submitted a report to Morton County State's Attorney Allen Koppy. Koppy will determine if further action will be taken, Neubauer said.

"The city is fully supportive of the right to recall," Neubauer said. "But it's our job to make sure the process is done in accordance with state law."