Nader Ballot access:

[cwelsch]

Last I heard he actually withdrew from Arizona entirely.

After the debacle in Pennsylvania (see Politics1 for reference) he can expect a load of challenges and scrutiny there, as well as fines and possibly state investigations.

Drop out Ralph, drop out!

Seriously, he's just hurting himself.  If people see hims truggle to get on 50 or 51 ballots then they will draw the direct comparison to 2000.  Improving on his 1996 performance brought his prestige up, but falling from his 2000 performance takes it way down.  He needs to go back to advocating his stupid regulations and lawsuits, endorse Kerry-Edwards, admit the Libertarians are like 50 times better organized.

[cwelsch]

1) They get it sometimes, as happened when they abbreviated the date on signatures that were then invalidated for not having the full date (err, MD or OH did this, forget where).

2) Competency, they had a plan since the last election, an extremely specific plan for 2 or 3 years, and have been implementing it since then.  We also have a number of lawyers who reportedly are pretty successful in ballot challenges.  Better to ignore us than challenge and lose.

3) Invisibility; we are ignored by the media so it would only be a news story to get challenged.  Better to ignore us than challenge and make a news story.

4) Confusion - whom do we hurt?  Traditional logic and some polls suggest we take away from the GOP, many new polls show a lot of potential support comes from Kerry voters, other polls show a lot of potential support from everywhere.  If we don't have a big sibling the way Ralph is just DNC Jr. then nobody picks on us.  If we were GOP Jr. then the might more likely crowd us out and pick on us the way the Democrats corwd out Nader.


Of course, the Constitution Party is also slated to make 50 again for their err, second or third time, forget which.  And frankly they aren't as organized or competent, I've seen their plans online.  The LP has been working for decades, the CP dates to 1992-ish.

I dunno, Perot supposedly got trashed all over the place by Bush in 1992, and I know Dole gave Clinton ANYTHING to keep Perot out of the debates that year.

They probably just think we're not worth it.