Nader thrown off Ohio ballot
Ruling expected to help Kerry
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Julie Carr Smyth and T.C. Brown
Plain Dealer Bureau
Columbus
Ohio's top elections official knocked independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader off the state's November ballot late Tuesday.
Republican Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell upheld a hearing officer's recommendation to scrap dozens of petitions challenged by Democrats, leaving Nader 1,292 signatures shy of the 5,000 required.
Nader was backed in recent polls by about 2 percent of Ohio's likely voters a small but important slice of the electorate in one of the year's most critical swing states.
His removal is good news for Ohio Democrats, who worked hard to get Nader off the ballot, in part because the polls showed that he would draw more Democratic voters than Republicans.
The decision leaves no serious third-party opposition for the tightly matched mainline candidates: Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
But Nader vowed to fight back. His spokesman, Kevin Zeese, said the campaign intends to sue to force Blackwell to revisit 9,000 signatures invalidated by local elections boards before the latest challenge.
"We expect to easily find [within those] the 1,300 to get us on the ballot," Zeese said.
With the help of professional out-of-state canvassing firms, the Nader campaign originally gathered and submitted 14,473 signatures, nearly triple what was needed.
But local challenges by Democrats winnowed that number to 6,464. A three-day hearing was held last week to determine the validity of those.
In front of hearing examiner Gretchen Quinn, a legal team led by Democratic attorney Don McTigue lined up multiple witnesses who admitted signing off on petitions they had not circulated, as well as lending their addresses and names, as Ohio residents, to the forms. Several said they did not know who Nader was.
The Bush campaign voiced little reaction to Blackwell's deci sion.
"Our campaign is focused on building our grass-roots organization and getting the president's positive message out to the people of Ohio," said Bush-Cheney '04 spokesman Kevin Madden.
He said he knew nothing about the hearing and declined to comment on any difference that Nader's removal from the ballot might make to the Bush campaign.
"We have seen polls having us up 4 points to having us up 11 points," Madden said. "We still have a campaign blueprint built around the idea that this will be a very close race."
The whole Nader question is moot now, said Dan Trevas, spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party.
"It's a question we'll never know the answer to because Ralph Nader chose to break the law in an attempt to get on the ballot," Trevas said.
He said the party "started getting calls from our folks at county fairs and in the streets of Ohio that this activity looked sus picious. The more we dug, the more it looked rotten."
Trevas pointed out that a number of Republican officeholders in smaller counties had signed Nader's petitions. "When they were asked by reporters if they supported Nader, they said they did it to help Bush," he said.
Nader's campaign suffered another blow Tuesday, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch bid to put his name on Oregon's ballot. Last week, the court sided with state election officials who found that flawed petitions left Nader short of the 15,306 signatures he needed.
Nader is on the ballot in more than 30 states and is suing for access in several others. In New Mexico, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered that Nader's name be placed before voters there. In Maine, a state judge also ruled Tuesday that Nader could remain on the ballot.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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