ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – It’s the end of May, but many already have November on their minds.

On Nov. 4, voters will decide who will lead the city as Mayor, but candidates have a lot of work to do and deadlines to meet before then.

There are currently 11 people in the race, and each of them have been working for weeks to try and secure a spot on the ballot. Each candidate has until June 21 to collect 3,000 signatures from registered voters who live in Albuquerque.

According to the city clerk’s website, Incumbent Tim Keller and local business owner, Daniel Chavez, have already completed the task and turned in 3,000 verified signatures. Former U.S. Attorney, Alex Uballez, is not far behind with 89% of his required signatures turned in.

Eddie Varela, retired fire chief, is sitting at 67% while other challengers Louie Sanchez, former police officer and city councilor, and former Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White have both turned in 57% of their required signatures.

“If they have some organization, if they have some name recognition. You know, those kinds of candidates are gonna have a better ability to raise the number of signatures,” said Tim Krebs, a political science professor at UNM.

For candidates that choose to run a publicly-funded campaign, they must collect 3,780 $5 contributions to qualify for public financing from the city for their campaigns. The funds can be used for advertisements, flyers, campaign events and more.

Incumbent Tim Keller has run a publicly-funded campaign since 2017, and so far he is just below 70% of the 3,780 contributions needed.

The two candidates trailing Keller is Darren White at 39% and Louie Sanchez, who has 17% of his contributions recorded.

“The $5 contributions are just designed to demonstrate to city officials that a candidate has a broad enough base of support from the community to qualify for public financing,” said Krebs.

Once a candidate qualifies to be publicly financed, they will receive a total of $755,000 from the city to run their campaigns.

Something many people don’t know is that those funds are paid for by the taxpayers, as the city allocates certain amounts of taxpayer dollars to the Campaign Finance Fund.

Part of the reason this system is in place is because of the bad reputation privately-financed campaigns have.

“People think that that’s just a way to invite corruption into the political system, so we opt for a publicly financed system that requires taxpayer dollars and so that’s the rationale behind it,” said Krebs.

If you would like to see what all of the candidates are using their contributions and campaign funds for, you can find that over on the city clerk’s website.