State Sen. Jim Libby, a Republican running for governor, said Thursday that he is withdrawing from the race after state officials identified numerous problems with paperwork he submitted to qualify for clean elections funding.

The Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics & Election Practices, which oversees campaign finance, issued a decision denying Libby’s request for certification as a clean elections candidate, citing fraudulent qualifying contributions and other issues.

The clean elections program is a voluntary campaign finance method that allows candidates to receive state funding on the condition that they accept only a limited number of small, private donations at the beginning of their run for office. To participate, candidates must submit a set number of $5 “qualifying contributions” showing a base level of support.

The 34-page decision from ethics commission staff said Libby failed to collect the 3,200 qualifying contributions needed for gubernatorial candidates to gain access to the state funding.

While Libby handed in the necessary number of contributions, many of them were ineligible due to missing or unsigned documentation. Staff also found that one of the people tasked with collecting qualifying contributions for Libby asked people to falsely affirm that they had donated $5 when they had not.

Staff did not find evidence that Libby had authorized the collection of fraudulent contributions, but said he should have hired a compliance director to ensure the veracity of the submissions.

Libby said in a text message to a reporter Thursday that he had decided to withdraw from the race. “My goal was to qualify as a clean elections candidate, and it seems no longer viable for me to continue,” he said.

He disagreed with the report’s findings, however. “Any insinuation that volunteers are somehow doing something wrong is ridiculous,” Libby said. “There is no incentive, financial or otherwise, to do so. The process to qualify is difficult, and people who volunteered to help did the best they could.”

In all, more than 1,000 of the more than 3,900 contributions his campaign submitted were found to be invalid or incomplete.

The person accused of gathering fraudulent contributions is identified in the report only as “Collector 1.”

In one incident, the report describes Collector 1 submitting a contribution from a Skowhegan woman who said she had been approached while leaving the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Augusta. She told the man who approached her that she was in a hurry and had no cash on her.

The woman said she signed one of the forms that the Libby campaign submitted to the commission, but had not seen another one containing a signature purporting to be hers, and did not give the campaign $5.

Staff concluded that Collector 1 had misrepresented the purpose of the form the woman signed, and that he or someone else forged her name on the other form.

The report included details of interviews with people in 14 similar cases, which the commission staff said led them to conclude that Collector 1’s work was generally not reliable.

They had limited time to review the paperwork, but said it was possible that additional contributions collected by Collector 1 were also fraudulent.

Jonathan Wayne, executive director of the commission, said Thursday that he could not comment when asked if any of the actions described in the report could result in criminal charges.

The report says the commission may conduct additional investigation into the actions of Collector 1 “for purposes of possible enforcement proceedings.”

Thursday’s decision comes after the commission received a complaint in February about one of the people working on Libby’s campaign allegedly offering to pay someone “under the table” if the person helped gather qualifying contributions.

Commission staff decided not to continue an investigation into that complaint because they found it was unlikely to reveal that Libby was benefiting from improper payments.