MACHIAS – About 700 of the signatures found to be fraudulent among the more than 61,000 collected by the Passamaquoddy Tribe to get the Washington County racino proposal on the November ballot were derived from listings in a telephone book, a tribal leader said this week.

Fred Moore, the tribe’s representative to the Legislature, was asked about the issue when he spoke Thursday evening to an audience of Machias Bay Area Chamber of Commerce members at a Business After Hours event.

Nearly 13,000 signatures were disqualified by officials in the Maine Secretary of State’s Office after Jan. 30, when Moore and his colleagues delivered the petitions to Augusta.

That outcome keeps the racino issue off the ballot this year.

Asked to elaborate on the failed petition drive, Moore revealed for the first time the reason for the drive’s most serious irregularity.

He heads the Coalition for a Washington County Tribal Track, a citizen initiative that paid individuals to gather signatures for the petition.

“A fraud occurred by one individual who seized the opportunity to make some money,” Moore said.

“Out of 1,400 signatures that he submitted, approximately 700 of them came out of a phone book. We could tell because of the way the signatures appeared on the sheet. He also was getting a tremendous amount of signatures in a short time.

“We discovered this ourselves and reported that to the secretary of state,” Moore said.

Those 700 discarded signatures were not included among the 12,985 that were disqualified for other reasons, Moore said.

The balance of the valid signatures are good for one year. Moore’s group plans to resubmit them before Aug. 4 in order to get on the ballot in 2007.

Moore said Thursday that the tribe was already in possession of 1,500 to 2,000 additional signatures that were received from municipal clerks statewide after the Jan. 30 deadline.

The signature-gathering effort will be revived soon, he said.

“We believe we can get the rest of these signatures within Washington County, and it would be meaningful for us to get them from here,” he said.

Of the 12,985 other signatures discounted by the Secretary of State’s Office and detailed last month:

. 8,212 are invalid because they were not certified by the registrar as belonging to a registered voter in that municipality.

. 2,430 are invalid because they are duplicates of signatures already counted.

. 575 are invalid because the circulator’s oath was not complete.

. 476 are invalid because the voter’s signature was withdrawn from the petition.

Moore said the group will seek about 2,000 or 3,000 more signatures in order to meet the minimum requirement for ballot status. The petition needs at least 50,519 signatures to be legally collected and signed by legitimate voters to advance.

The tribe would like to build a commercial racetrack and slot machine complex somewhere in Washington County modeled after the Hollywood Slots facility that opened last fall in Bangor.

Moore’s other comments Thursday evening centered mostly on the relationship the tribe envisions having with the rest of Washington County. He spoke extensively of “neighbors” and “community.”

“We have begun to take real and serious steps to change the way we have worked in the past,” he said. “The tribe is not going to make it alone economically in this county, state or country. Only by working together with partners will we succeed.”

Although Moore’s talk was billed as an update and discussion on both LNG and racino issues, he did not address the liquefied natural gas project that he and Rep. Ian Emery, R-Cutler, are heading for a Calais site on the St. Croix River.

“I will speak generally to the issue of LNG, not to a specific project,” he said of the three plans at different stages of development for the Passamaquoddy Bay.

“I believe you will see the construction of one facility within five years. But exactly where or which one, I won’t say.”