NEW YORK -- Sen. John McCain has sued the New York Republican Party in an effort to force the party to put his name on its presidential primary ballot.

''John McCain deserves to be on the ballot here in New York and the scores of New Yorkers who support him deserve the opportunity to vote for him,'' said Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, who is heading the Arizona senator's New York campaign. ''That's what this suit is about. It's that simple.''

McCain hopes to get his name on the ballot as a challenger to the party front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. The New York primary will be held March 7.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, challenges rules that require candidates to collect about 20,000 signatures from registered party members, including a certain number of signatures in each of the state's 31 congressional districts. This can be especially challenging in parts of the state like New York City where there are few registered Republicans. It also means that a candidate must set up petition drives in 31 separate areas.

And because legal challenges to the signatures are so common, candidates attempting to meet the requirements typically try to collect three times the minimum number of signatures to make sure their final list will pass muster.

A spokesman for the Bush campaign said the Texan ''is very proud to have grassroots support in New York.''

''Today's action is indicative that Sen. McCain lacks grassroots support in New York,'' said the spokesman, Ari Fleischer. ''How else do you explain why he was able to qualify in Virginia but not New York?''

Fleischer described Virginia's petitioning process as comparable to New York's because it also requires collecting a certain number of signatures from party members in every congressional district.

But Molinari insisted that McCain is popular here just not all that well-equipped. He called McCain's forces in New York an ''all-volunteer army'' and added: ''There isn't a state in the entire union that has laws that are so onerous as New York state laws. And never before in New York state history has that become clearer than this year.''

A spokesman for the state Republican Party did not immediately return a phone call for comment.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Brooklyn by McCain, R-Ariz., Molinari, and political activist Larry Rockefeller.

Similar claims were made by Steve Forbes in a lawsuit filed in 1996 that persuaded a federal court to place his name on a Republican primary ballot that year.

The lawsuit was prepared by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff & Abady, the same legal team that litigated the 1996 case.

''The New York State Republican primary has maintained its record as the least democratic election in the nation,'' Brennan Center President E. Josheua Rosenkranz said in a statement. ''Elections are supposed to express the voters' choice. Laws that arbitrarily restrict that choice to one or two candidates are blatantly unconstitutional.''