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Nader off Florida Ballot
Rory writes "This could be it for Ralph Nader. A Florida judge has issued a preliminary injunction, ruling the Reform Party is no longer a party, thereby knocking its candidate, Ralph Nader, off the Florida ballot. The devil is in the details, and Florida has too many electoral votes for this not to have serious impact on the national election, if this preliminary ruling holds up on appeal."
This story is a week old. Last I heard Jeb declared the ruling invalid and Nader's on the ballot.
Dupetown, USA, but it still warrants a response.
I think it is a sad day in politics if you have to be affiliated with a party in order to run for office, especially President. The constitution protected our right to hold public office before these judges "modified" their interpretations of it for "our own good".
I think the ballot should have as many people as want to run, perhaps with a petition saying x number of people will vote for me, like 5,000 or so.
This is already how many states do it, but this seems a sad attempt by Jeb's good ol' boys to block a change in the outcome of the 2004 election.
Chris
Radar rocks!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Not that I'm surprised. They're just trying to hold on to power using whatever legal means possible. Perfectly natural behavior.
Doesn't make it right though.
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This concludes our transmission to Oceania.
As a student of History, I understand why the Electoral College exists. What I don't understand is /why/ we're still using it.
I hail from one of the less populous Western states, and we haven't had a presiential candidate, or his running mate, set foot in the state for years. Seems like you just get the five states with the most electoral votes, and ignore the rest of the country.
This is very old news. The case has had about five iterations since then.
From what I have read, the current status is that the Florida Supreme Court has halted the release of abstentee ballots pending a decision in the case that might come Saturday. So far, both a trial judge and an appellate court have found that the Reform party is not a legitimate state party, and so Nader can't get on the ballot. The Secretary of State has appealled both decisions.
And here's a Miami Herald story, that's, you know, actually from today 'n shit.
Interesting that Nader was trying to get on the Florida ballot as the Reform Party's candidate. Hopefully, this will remind folks that Ralph Nader is not the Green Party candidate for President in 2004!
That honor belongs to David Cobb, who is working to build the Green Party from the ground up. Contrast with Nader, who wanted to use the party's (still limited) ballot access to prove a point.
And according to Cobb's site, the Green Party has a ballot line in Florida. Unlike Nader, though, Cobb cares who wins the election:
http://www.votecobb.org/news/camden
"Cobb said he is asking people to vote for him in states like New Jersey, where polls show Kerry is ahead of Bush by 10 percentage points. In states where the race is close, he said he will understand that some liberal voters would support Kerry instead of him."
Nader's time as a candidate is over. So long, and thanks for all the fi^W safety!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
But now he's off for good.
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This concludes our transmission to Oceania.
As other's have mentioned, Nader was ordered off, then an elections administrator put him back on the absentee ballots, then the Florida Supreme Court ordered the elections administrator to not send them until it could rule.
In other, more pertinent, news, Michael Badnarik is on 49 ballots. 49, not the low 30s like Nader.
At the end of the day Nader doesn't matter because people have already watched him lose before. Cobb doesn't matter because he can't decide whether he's really a candidate or not ("Vote for me, unless you'd rather vote for Kerry, I mean, vote for me"). Peroutka doesn't matter because he's a religious nut.
Badnarik matters. He is the only candidate on 49 ballots who is against the war. He is the only candidate on 49 ballots who is against the Patriot Act. He is the only candidate on 49 ballots who is not wasting the American people's fucking time with silly accusations about who did or not do what during Vietnam or which memos are fake.
Your conscience called, it wants its vote back.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...let Badnarik debate...
So, check it out. I really like Nader and many of his ideas, but unfortunately, he doesen't have the ability(campaign power|money|back) to really put forth a winning chance. So I read an article like this and all I can say is that I'd really like to care, but unfortunately, one does not go from 6% of the popular vote to 40-50% in less than a year. Sorry, Ralphie. Dark side, or light side. Pick one. Everybody else did.
Who's that? I know Ralph Nader was taken off the ballot, but Nadar? Never heard of him...
Has Slashdot sunk to a new nadir?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
It's interesting for me to consider:
Insofar as those voting for Nader were more likely to be from the "Gore" camp than the "Bush" camp in the last election, and probably are more likely to be from the "Kerry" camp than the "Bush" camp in this election, isn't/wasn't it in the non-Gore / non-Kerry interest respectively to give Nader as many votes as can possibly be taken from the entire left-of-center field?
For example, I would think giving five thousand dollars to Nader's campaign in Florida would empower the Republican interest more than giving five thousand more dollars to Bush's. (Diminishing returns - Bush already is reaching almost all the republicans, but Nader's campaign is small, and the very very lefts might be swayable).
As I understand it, the margin between Bush and Gore last year was so close in Florida that if Nader had "taken" even slightly fewer votes from Gore (insofar as Nader's votes probably would NOT have gone to Bush instead), Bush could not have prevailed. Hence the vote-swapping among Naderites who were aware of how close swing states would be, but nevertheless wanted their candidate represented. (Vote swapping consisted, as I understand it, of, say, a Massachusetts Gore-ite gentlemanly agreeing with a Florida Nader-ite to vote Nader / Gore respectively.)
Objectively, do you think that Nader gets any support from sources whose soul interest in his campaign is to "take" votes away from the more moderate (but non-zero-chance-of-winning) side?
This post does NOT advocate any political viewpoint.
In contrast, our system encourages the majority party to ram everything they can think of through because in 4 years they could be the ones in the minority, powerless to stop the other party from doing whatever THEY want. Instead of trying to find common ground, we demonize. 51% of the electorate ignoring the wishes of the other 49% isn't compromise, it's what's tearing this country apart.
Actually he's not off for good. As the article you linked to says, they have simply postoned the mailing of ballots until this has been resolved in the Florida Supreme Court. They will decide whether he is on or off.
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
Last week was a preliminary injunction, this is the hearing. Nader is off and the Florida supreme court has issued an injunction preventing any more ballots being sent out without their permission.
The Bushies did try to do an end run by ignoring the first injunction and sending out as many ballots as they could, but only a few were actually mailed and those are likely to end up being cancelled. The net effect is likely to be damage to Bush since the four counties that sent out the invalid postal ballots are ones where the GOP controls the returning officer - i.e. republican areas.
This whole Nader issue is a GOP shell game. Nader does not have the support of 100,000 floridians that it takes to get on the ballot through petition. He is unlikely to poll that number nationwide. In fact he is unlikely to even qualify for the ballot in enough states to have a mathematical chance of winning.
The 'reform' party does not have a significant national membership, Nader has had four years to form a 'leftwing cretins who want to hand the election to Bush' party and has not done so.
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Bush didn't file in Florida as the Republican candidate in time to meet the state's September 1 cutoff. That goofy state prohibits alluding to "September 11" in convention scheduling via a prescient old law. If the Democrats worked from the Karl Rove playbook, without worrying how to manage the country they steal, the whole game would now be over.
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