The Humane Society of the United States says it has submitted more than 190,000 signatures to the Missouri Secretary of State's office in support of its state ballot initiative aimed at eliminating puppy mills in the state, according to a news release posted on the group's Web site.

The proposal is called the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act — or, officially, Statutory Amendment to Chapter 273, Relating to Dog Breeders 2010-086 — but is widely seen as another HSUS effort to gain a foothold on animal handling laws at the state level. 

The next step is for the Secretary of State's office to review the petitions and send them to local election authorities in order to verify the signatures against their voter registration records. Petitions that meet the legal criteria will be certified as sufficient by 5 p.m. on Aug. 3, a news release on the department's Web site says.

Missouri statute, the Web site says, valid signatures from registered voters equal to 5 percent of the total votes cast in the 2008 governor's election from six of the state's nine congressional districts must be submitted. Depending on the combination of districts, the number of signatures required ranges between approximately 91,818 and 99,600 valid signatures.

HSUS's ballot initiative was one of only four such proposals to submit a sufficient number of signatures by the deadline last Sunday, out of more than a dozen initially introduced.

HSUS has had mixed success with its efforts to change animal handling laws at the state level, passing the high-profile Proposition 2 in California in 2008 but failing in its efforts to prevent a similar, industry-backed initiative, called Issue 2, from passing in Ohio last fall.