How to Capture a Wild Republican Caleb Ferguson for The New York Times Isaac Baskin, who is going door to door gathering voter signatures so that John A. Catsimatidis, a Republican, can appear on the primary ballot, knocked on a door on Manse Street in Queens. There are four-leaf clovers, Honus Wagner baseball cards, and postage stamps that were printed upside-down. And then there are honest-to-goodness registered Republicans in New York City, a species nearly as rare as the Cronut. On a recent summer afternoon, Isaac Baskin's task was to find such specimens. Standing on a voter's stoop in Forest Hills, Queens, Mr. Baskin, a petitioner for the mayoral campaign of John A. Catsimatidis, heard the sound of a car engine. It was the registered Republican, inching out of his driveway in a gray Toyota sedan. Mr. Baskin, 21, hopped down the steps and jogged after the car. "Hello!" he called to the rolled-up window, vigorously waving the other hand. Hello? The driver frowned. The Toyota rolled straight past Mr. Baskin and down Manse Street. Every mayoral candidate needs 3,750 voter signatures to appear on the primary ballot in September. With about 3 million registered Democrats in the city, Democratic canvassers can stand on a street corner and let the deluge pour forth. It is not so easy for Republicans, whose party counts only about 470,000 registered voters, mostly in enclaves outside Manhattan. Republican hopefuls like Mr. Catsimatidis can be so hard-pressed for signatures that they make individual appointments with registered voters. "You can't stand outside the supermarket, you can't stand outside the subway stop, you can't collect signatures on the street," said Eric Ulrich, a Republican city councilman from Queens, who said he has had his grandmother, among other volunteers, gather signatures for him. You literally have to go knocking on doors, door to door, to gain ballot access. As he watched the Toyota recede, Mr. Baskin, a senior at SUNY College at Geneseo who is petitioning in a handful of middle-class Queens neighborhoods, wondered aloud if he should have taken more desperate measures; rapped on the window, for instance, or stood in front of the car. "That was probably my fault," he said. Undaunted by the signature that drove away, Mr. Baskin kept walking. He offered tips: barking dogs are often followed by people; voters are easier to persuade at doors than at windows. First impressions are important. "You want to look like an innocent person, which you are," Mr. Baskin said. Later, on Kessel Street, Cornelia Facinelli, who is in her 70s, agreed to sign. She said, however, that she was voting for Anthony D. Weiner, a Democrat. "That's a New York Republican for you," Mr. Baskin said when she was out of earshot, resigned but smiling. Even if we have a 100 percent showing and the Democrats have a 50 percent showing, they still win. Mr. Baskin knows well the value of every signature. In New York, a state that can claim about half of the country's election litigation, most campaign-related lawsuits involve petitions, said Jerry H. Goldfeder, an election lawyer who is working for the mayoral campaign of Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. Candidates can - and do - challenge their rivals" petitions for reasons including illegible signatures or missing dates or ZIP codes. A typo temporarily knocked Bill de Blasio off the ballot in 2009, when he was running for public advocate. The process, which dates to the 1800s, is so fraught with obstacles that Mr. Goldfeder has advocated eliminating it in favor of a system that would allow contenders to earn spots on the ballot by raising a certain amount of money or gaining a certain percentage of support in the polls. For now, it comes down to canvassers like Mr. Baskin, who knocks on doors for up to eight hours a shift. By day's end, he had 16 signatures - not bad, though not his best work. "Eighty percent of it is to get them to the door," he reflected. The rest is you.