The 73 candidates who filed to run for Richmond office submitted 1,835 pages of petitions with 25,060 signatures of purportedly registered voters, according to city Voter Registrar Kirk Showalter.

Every one of the signatures had to be checked against the state database of registered voters to ensure they were valid, Ms. Showalter said.

Ultimately, 14 candidates, including five seeking to run for mayor, were disqualified for having too few signatures. Another candidate was disqualified for failing to file other required forms.

Ms. Showalter said her office faced a time crunch to get the signatures checked because 50 of the 73 candidates who filed for mayor, City Council and the School Board submitted their petitions close to the June 14 deadline.

Ms. Showalter said that was just one assignment undertaken by her and the six staff members who checked the signatures. They also were continuing to register voters and prepare for the June 14 congressional primary election.

The flood of signatures is the result of the requirements candidates must meet. Those running for mayor needed to have petitions with a minimum of 500 signatures of registered voters, with at least 50 from each of the city’s nine voting districts.

Candidates for City Council and the School Board each needed 125 signatures of registered voters from the district in which they are running.

The petition checks found that 10,507 signatures, or 42 percent, could not be identified.

A signature check is simple, Ms. Showalter said, when the signer includes a legible printed name and address and a partial Social Security number that matches information on the state’s computer list.

The work is more difficult and time consuming when the name is hard to read or the listed address is not on the state list and no partial Social Security number is included, she said.

Ms. Showalter said she, as well as her staff, double- and triple-checked 3,089 of the signatures before ruling them out, either due to illegibility or because they did not match a voter on the state list.

The signatures that got the extra scrutiny were on the petitions submitted by the candidates who were ultimately disqualified.

The multiple checks did save one mayoral candidate who initially was one signature short. Ms. Showalter said that she reviewed signatures for that candidate at least five times before she found the 500th qualifying signature.