Volunteer Cadre Unites, Loosely, to Draft Perot : Ballot: Backers of the Texas maverick combine revival meeting fervor and computer techniques in bid to put him in the presidential race.

Each weekend for the past month, Sam Johnson has climbed into his seven-year-old Mazda and driven off on a one-man barnstorm across California on behalf of someone who may or may not run for President: Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot.

Meeting with potential converts in restaurants and hotel rooms from Orange County to the Bay Area, the Visalia home builder quietly talks up Perot, who gained fame in 1979 by staging a commando-style rescue of two employees from a Tehran prison amid the turmoil of the Iranian revolution.

Johnson is among a growing cadre of loosely organized--and at times, highly disorganized--true Perot believers in California and other states who are working to persuade the maverick Dallas businessman to campaign for President in this unsettled election season.

Johnson took to the road last month after Perot allowed on a nationwide radio call-in show that he would run as an independent if “ordinary people” could get his name on the November ballot in all 50 states.

The remark touched off a nationwide draft-Perot movement that combines the fervor of a Texas Panhandle revival meeting with Computer Age organizing techniques.

At its center is a Perot-financed 800-phone number complex in Dallas that has been receiving so many calls from would-be supporters--an average of 200,000 a day recently--that MCI has enlisted the phone system serving the Home Shopping Network to handle the load.

Despite this response to the bait Perot dangled, political analysts say there are daunting obstacles to getting him on the ballot in each state, especially if the movement relies only on volunteers. And the analysts caution that the initial wave of support for him may flatten as backers learn more about his views on controversial issues like abortion rights and gun control--both of which Perot favors.

Although Perot--whose fortune was ranked 21st in the nation by Forbes magazine--has said he may bankroll the petition drives, they are essentially volunteer efforts now, a Perot spokeswoman said.

In California, Perot’s active supporters--estimated at a few hundred so far--are struggling to organize a petition drive despite scant political experience and strained relations with the Dallas-based Perot Petition Committee.

“They’ve got plenty of money but they’re not passing it out,” groused Bob Hayden, a Ventura engineer who is Perot’s California chairman, referring to the Dallas group.

“I see no effort, no intent, no planning, no discussion of helping us,” he said.

But Hayden and others believe the drive will pick up speed as more Californians become aware of the potential candidacy of the flinty, 61-year-old Texan.

While Perot has sought to give the impression of a man interested only in accepting a draft, he is actively promoting himself on the airwaves. Within the last week, he appeared on three nationwide television shows--”This Week With David Brinkley,” “Donahue” and “This Morning.”

After each appearance, calls have flooded the 800 number at his Dallas headquarters. An MCI spokesman said Friday that more than 1.1 million calls were on the line in a 10-day period ending Thursday. An unknown number were repeat calls from people who could not get through due to heavy traffic.

Earlier this week, the volume created near-chaos in Dallas, as the committee’s phone system crashed several times and technicians worked frantically to boost the number of lines from about a dozen to nearly 1,300.

So heavy was the flow of calls that MCI began routing out-of-Texas calls through the Florida-based Home Shopping Network, which sells merchandise over 800 numbers displayed on cable television.

Following his TV appearances, would-be backers in California called newspapers and television stations across the state seeking information on how to contact the former IBM salesman who turned a $1,000 investment into a $2.5-billion computer services firm.

“He can buy anybody but he can’t be bought,” said Bette Reinhartsen, a Hemet retiree who spent the better part of Wednesday trying to get through by phone to the “draft-Perot” movement’s Dallas office.

“I don’t think he’s going to bounce any checks,” she said.

Political consultants who specialize in signature-gathering said it is possible for Perot supporters to get the total number of names needed to qualify him for the ballot in every state. But they said there are potential pitfalls in such a massive operation, especially if it is run by inexperienced volunteers.

The main problem, the consultants said, is that state ballot-qualification rules differ widely. While presidential candidates need no signatures to get on Louisiana’s ballot, for instance, California requires nearly 135,000. And in some states, a certain number of signatures must come from each congressional district.

Deadlines and other rules also vary from state to state, and failure to follow them can result in large numbers of signatures being invalidated.

The Perot movement needs “a nationally coordinated effort by someone who’s familiar with the laws in each state to make sure this is done right,” said Richard Arnold, president of National Voter Outreach in Encinitas, who met recently with a number of Perot associates to discuss the ballot-drive effort.

As an example of the problems that can crop up, Arnold said that in 1988, Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in Missouri but was knocked off because his petitions did not include other required documents.

Political observers also note that even if Perot were to get on all state ballots, he still would face the enormous logistical problems of running a national campaign--and selling himself to voters who may be familiar with his fortune and Tehran exploits but not with his positions on the issues.

Although his California backers are highly enthusiastic about Perot, many seem unaware of his specific political beliefs.

“What’s his slant on labor?” asked Reinhartsen.

Perot has been widely painted in the media as a conservative, and he harbors some views that would please Ronald Reagan.

But, said Larry Berg, director of USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, “A lot of his people . . . would be astonished to learn he supports abortion rights and gun control. That would get rid of about half” of his current supporters.

In addition, some California fans are restive that Perot has not simply jumped into the presidential race with a Texas-sized splash rather than hold back in a manner reminiscent of New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

“That kind of half-in, half-out thing--that’s what Cuomo did,” sniffed Eileen Burkett, a Westwood real estate broker who nonetheless raves about Perot as a “guy I’m passionate about.”

But Hayden, Perot’s state coordinator, believes the important thing now is to meet the Aug. 7 deadline to get the 134,781 signatures necessary to place Perot’s name on the California ballot.

“I don’t want to talk about the issues,” Hayden snapped. “He’ll articulate the issues when he starts campaigning.”

Times special correspondent Christopher Pummer contributed to this story.