WARREN — The news keeps getting worse for Dana Peloso.

After giving up his fight on Monday to stay in the race for the District 67 seat in the state House of Representatives, the 25-year-old Republican was in the audience yesterday as the Warren Board of Canvassers voted in favor of an investigation into allegations that signatures were improperly collected by his now-defunct campaign.

The local board will send affidavits to the state Board of Elections from three Warren residents who say they never signed Peloso’s nomination papers and don’t know how their signatures got on the documents.

Vinny Calenda, chairman of the three-member Board of Canvassers, said the Board of Elections will likely have the state police conduct an investigation into whether the signatures were forged.

“Where it goes from there, I’m not sure,” he said at the meeting in Town Hall.

The questions in Warren are similar to the problems in Barrington that led to Peloso being forced out of the race.

Under state law, the candidate was required to collect 50 signatures from registered voters in the district that encompasses parts of both towns. Only 33 of the 56 signatures he collected from Warren residents were certified by the Warren Board of Canvassers. Town Clerk Julie Coelho said yesterday that many of the names on the papers were illegible. They could not be verified and were thus disqualified.

Meanwhile, the Barrington Board of Canvassers certified only 4 of the 28 signatures Peloso submitted to the Town Clerk’s office there. Board members said most of the signatures on his papers didn’t match the signatures on voter registration cards previously collected by the town.

With a total of only 37 signatures, Peloso was well short of the requisite number. Facing the demise of his campaign, he filed an appeal with the state Board of Elections last week, saying that he knew the people who signed his papers in Barrington and could vouch for their signatures. He did not challenge the decision of the Warren Board of Canvassers.

At the Board of Elections’ office Monday morning, however, he withdrew his appeal and in effect conceded defeat. Afterward, he said that although he maintained that the signatures were authentic he could not prove his case to the board. Moreover, he acknowledged that the signatures on the papers and those on the voter registration cards did indeed look different.

Although Peloso said he was confident in the Barrington signatures, he did not express the same confidence in the Warren signatures.

“I can’t tell you one way or the other how the names got on there,” he told the Warren Board of Canvassers yesterday afternoon. “I don’t check IDs when I take signatures.”

In Barrington, Peloso went door-to-door to collect signatures. In Warren, he went along Main Street in downtown to get signatures. He also had Warren residents who attended the Bristol Fourth of July parade sign the papers.

Coelho said that concerns arose after she started calling people to verify signatures that didn’t look like those on voter registration cards. On one of the first calls, the person said he never signed Peloso’s papers and wanted to make a written complaint. Two more people also submitted signed affidavits. The three people are Jeffrey Creighton, Alfred Silva and Frank Petty.

Calenda said at the meeting that two other people complained to him that they didn’t know how their signatures got on Peloso’s papers. Those people did not put their allegations in writing, however.

Peloso asked the board if other candidates were being subjected to the same level of scrutiny.

“We went through every single candidate’s nomination papers,” Calenda said.

After the meeting, Peloso said he would cooperate with any investigation into the signatures.

“I will do whatever they ask me,” he said.

akuffner@projo.com