Topeka ? With just minutes to spare Monday, Horace Edwards of Topeka delivered his petition to run as an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate.

“It has been an 11th-hour operation,” said Edwards, who served as secretary of the Kansas Department of Transportation under former Gov. Mike Hayden.

About five minutes before the noon deadline, Edwards paid a $20 fee and handed over to the secretary of state’s office a box of petitions with the signatures of 5,267 people.

To get on the ballot by petition, a candidate for Senate must provide signatures of at least 5,000 registered voters.

Now, verifying the signatures will take one or two weeks and will determine whether Edwards will indeed be on the ballot in the November general election.

Edwards, 79, said he had to use the petition process because he decided to run after the regular filing deadline for candidates had passed.

“The regrettable part is that I arrived at the conclusion that I need to do this extremely late in the game,” he said.

Edwards, who formed his own engineering consulting firm after leaving state government, said he would like to replace U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican, because Brownback has focused on socially conservative issues.

“The priorities are skewed and narrowed,” he said.

Signature gatherers had set up in several places around Lawrence the past couple of weeks to help Edwards.

Brownback, who is seeking a second six-year term, faces Lawrence businessman Arch Naramore in today’s Republican Party primary.

In the Democratic primary, there are two candidates: Lee Jones, a railroad engineer from Lenexa, and Robert Conroy, a retired railroad engineer from Shawnee.