This is not going to be very scientific, but because of the announcement today that Zac Crain did not get enough signatures to make the Dallas mayoral ballot, I did a little number crunching.

It only takes 473 valid signatures to make it on the ballot. Is 473 really that large of a number?

I used our band listings to pull some rough figures on how many musicians played on his fundraiser album that has gotten so much attention. Out of laziness, I am only including musicians/bands listed in the Pegasus News band database. That means that the following bands/musicians were not included:

The Crash That Took Me, Philip E. Karnats, The Dutch Treats, Dove Hunter, Ben Kweller, Rose County Fair, and Hardin Sweaty and the Ready to Go

Also, while it is possible that backup musicians played on their tracks, I only counted the tracks by Tim DeLaughter and Salim Nourallah as having 1 musicians each. I also subtracted 4 musicians to account for the Chris Holt effect whereby one musician could play in multiple bands that appear on the same compilation. So I feel like the number I have come up with is conservative.

That magic number is 80. If Zac had gotten one signature for each person that appeared on his album, he would have had at least 16% of his burden already taken care of (probably more).

Now lets look at his contributors. I counted each of the names of people that gave Zac money. Then I rounded it down to a nice even number. That number was 95. Lets take off 5 of those names for places where the contributors list might overlap with the musician list, bringing us down even further to 90.

If Zac would have gotten one signature for each of the people that put enough faith in him to give his campaign money, he would have taken care of over 19% of his burden. And of course this does not even count the people that supported him financially by buying his album.

Now lets look back at when Zac began campaigning. I'm not exactly sure when he officially decided to run for mayor, so lets take a conservative estimate. Lets say, February 9th, 2006 since that is when this article appeared in the Observer. Now lets pretend that Zac was only allowed to get only two valid signatures a day from that day forward (in this scenario, even if lets say he had a fundraiser at the Double Wide that lots of people went to and would be very easy to approach for signatures, he would have to limit it to two). At two a day, he would now be at 812 signatures. That would account for over 170% of his burden.

Zac stopped by our offices a few weeks back for an interview. He was very nice and generous with his time. I truly believe that he was taking the idea of becoming mayor seriously. However, we dodged a bullet. As one of my colleagues said a few moments ago - "If he's too busy to get signatures, what do you expect he'll do on the JOB?"