Joel Wendland
>From: R <rhisiart at charter.net>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: [lbo-talk] reactionary attack on democratic rights
>Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:39:26 -0700
>
>Democrats’ drive to keep Nader off ballot: a reactionary attack on
>democratic rights
>By Patrick Martin 26 August 2004
>
>The Michigan Board of State Canvassers on August 23 blocked certification
>of petitions to place independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader on the
>state ballot. The board deadlocked 2-2 on whether to certify more than
>50,000 signatures filed on behalf of Nader, far more than the 31,000
>required by state law. The two Democrats on the board voted to keep Nader
>off the ballot, while the two Republicans voted to put him on. The deadlock
>means that the issue will now be resolved in the courts.
>
>Michigan is the fifth state in a week where Nader has been denied ballot
>status by administrative or court action, following Illinois, Maryland,
>Missouri and Virginia. In each case, the challenges to Nader’s ballot
>status have been brought by the Democratic Party, which is escalating its
>attack on the democratic rights of hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
>of potential Nader voters, seeking to deny them any choice other than Bush
>or Kerry.
>
>On the same day as the Michigan decision, a federal court in Illinois
>denied Nader’s challenge to state election laws. The lawsuit asked the
>court to set aside the state’s June 21 deadline for submitting a nominating
>petition, calling it too restrictive. The suit also sought the
>reinstatement of petition signatures challenged by the Democrats because
>the signers, while registered to vote, had moved since registering and
>signed the petition using an address different from the address on the
>election rolls.
>
>In Virginia, officials of the Democratic-controlled state government
>initially rejected the petitions filed by the Nader campaign on the
>thinnest of technicalities. The Nader campaign sought to file its petition
>August 20, submitting well over the 10,000 signatures required for ballot
>status. Board of Elections Secretary Jean R. Jensen refused to accept the
>petition because the sheets were not grouped by congressional district.
>
>State law requires that, in addition to 10,000 signatures overall, there be
>at least 400 signatures from each of the state’s 11 congressional
>districts. The physical grouping of the petition sheets by congressional
>district is purely an administrative convenience, not required by law, but
>the board official used this as a pretext to disqualify Nader. This came at
>the prompting of a Democratic Party official who was present at the board
>offices observing the Nader filing.
>
>On Monday, Virginia Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore, a Republican,
>ordered the Board of Elections to reconsider the Nader petitions, declaring
>in a five-page letter that the board had not actually ratified the rule
>requiring petitions to be grouped before filing.
>
>Challenges are under way in other states. In Pennsylvania, where the Nader
>campaign submitted 47,000 signatures, the Democrats have filed suit
>charging that the vast majority are fraudulent. In West Virginia, the state
>attorney general, Darrell McGraw Jr., a Democrat, filed a lawsuit charging
>that Nader petition circulators had violated state election laws.
>
>Nader petitions have been rejected in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma
>and Texas, and the Nader campaign failed to file in California, where the
>state requirement is a whopping 153,000 signatures. Other Nader petitions
>face administrative challenges that may ultimately end up in court,
>including in Iowa, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire and Oregon.
>
>Nader has filed petitions in recent weeks in nearly two dozen other states,
>while petitioning continues in a half dozen more. He has already obtained
>ballot status in seven states through support from the Reform Party, the
>rump of the organization established by billionaire Ross Perot in his 1992
>and 1996 presidential campaigns. Nader also received the presidential
>nomination of the Independence Party, a third party with ballot status in
>Delaware.
>
>Anti-democratic US election laws make it necessary for Nader, who won
>nearly three million votes in the 2000 presidential campaign, to collect as
>many as 1.5 million petition signatures to obtain ballot status in all 50
>states. While his campaign has claimed that Nader will do better than in
>2000, when he appeared on the ballot in 43 states, the spate of legal and
>administrative challenges now makes that unlikely, and Nader could appear
>on as few as 25 or 30 state ballots. He seems likely to be excluded from
>the ballot in California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois, five
>of the eight largest states.
>
>
>Disruption and sabotage
>
>The Democratic Party has waged a campaign of disruption and sabotage
>against Nader that is flagrantly anti-democratic. A group of Democratic
>Party lobbyists and fundraisers have established a nominally independent
>group, Ballot Project Inc., as the vehicle for this effort, collecting more
>than $100,000 in contributions as well as pro bono legal assistance from
>Democratic Party-affiliated lawyers which, according to organizers, is
>worth up to $2 million.
>
>Toby Moffett, a former Democratic congressman and longtime lobbyist, who
>co-founded Ballot Project Inc., described the purpose of the ballot access
>challenges in unabashedly anti-democratic terms. In an interview with the
>Washington Post, Moffett said, “We wanted to neutralize his campaign by
>forcing him to spend money and resources defending these things.” He added,
>“Much to our astonishment we’ve actually been more successful than we
>thought we’d be in stopping him from getting on at all.”
>
>Two other Democratic anti-Nader groups, the Nader Factor and Stop Nader,
>have begun media attacks against Nader, launching a $500,000 ad campaign
>against a candidate who is not on the ballot in most states and has not yet
>run a single television spot on his own behalf.
>
>Counting both the fundraising and the free legal assistance, the Democrats
>have mobilized more resources to keep Nader off the ballot than the $2.5
>million that Nader and his running mate, Peter Camejo, have raised up to
>now to finance their own campaign.
>
>The anti-Nader effort has gone well beyond the use of technicalities, like
>those cited above in Virginia, to include political dirty tricks and
>outright intimidation. In Oregon, one of the most hotly contested
>states—and one of Nader’s strongest in 2000—the Democrats successfully
>blocked Nader’s first effort to obtain ballot status, which his supporters
>attempted by holding a convention with an attendance of at least 1,000
>people, one of the methods prescribed by state law. On the day of the
>convention, the Democrats packed the hall with their own supporters,
>preventing many Nader supporters from getting inside, and then refused to
>vote to nominate him, thus frustrating the whole procedure.
>
>The Nader campaign then launched a petition drive to collect the nearly
>15,000 signatures required under an alternative procedure. The Democrats
>responded by mailing a letter from the party’s attorneys to circulators of
>the Nader petition, warning that they were investigating “whether
>fraudulent signature-gathering techniques were used in the circulation of
>those petitions,” and threatening circulators by saying their involvement
>“may result in a conviction of a felony with a fine of up to $100,000 or
>prison for up to five years.”
>
>In Pennsylvania, where the Nader campaign filed 47,000 signatures, the
>Democrats photocopied the entire petition, mobilized dozens of lawyers,
>legal aides, software programmers and data entry personnel, and created a
>database of all 47,000 names. In the space of a week, they checked each
>name against the state’s list of registered voters, and then filed a
>challenge to the bulk of the signatures. The Nader campaign, without the
>same resources, is in a difficult position to fight such a line-by-line
>challenge, however bogus the objections may be.
>
>The Socialist Equality Party confronted similar tactics in Champaign,
>Illinois, but was able to overcome the challenge to the petition filed by
>its candidate, Tom Mackaman, by diverting resources from other ballot
>drives. The SEP conducted its own line-by-line review of petitions and
>proved that the Democrats were carrying out a bad faith challenge.
>Democratic officials deliberately challenged signatures as invalid when
>they knew there was no basis for doing so—including the signature of the
>candidate himself.
>
>The issues raised in Nader’s challenge to the Illinois filing deadline are
>similar to those in the legal challenge that SEP candidate David Lawrence
>is making in Ohio to the March 1 filing deadline for congressional
>candidates. In both cases the plaintiffs are arguing that early filing
>deadlines are arbitrary and discriminatory.
>
>When it has served their purposes, the Democrats have challenged the same
>deadlines they are now using against third-party candidates. In a case
>decided last week in Louisiana, the Democratic Party successfully argued
>against a filing deadline for Congress, after incumbent Democratic
>Congressman Rodney Alexander switched parties and filed as a Republican for
>reelection.
>
>Alexander initially filed as a Democrat, but on the last day, 15 minutes
>before the deadline, refiled as a Republican. This transparent attempt to
>rig the election—Alexander would have faced no significant Republican or
>Democratic opponent—was overturned by a friendly Democratic judge, who held
>that legal technicalities should be set aside in the interests of
>democratic rights. The judge ruled, quite correctly, that Democratic voters
>were being denied the right to have an effective candidate, and he extended
>the filing period to allow more candidates to enter the race.
>
>
>A “big lie” campaign
>
>The Democratic Party campaign against Nader is utilizing the cynical tactic
>of treating all political opponents to its left as illegitimate, and
>branding them as agents of the right wing. Party spokesmen have repeatedly
>declared that the Nader campaign is nothing more than an instrument of Bush
>and the Republicans for the purpose of splitting the “anti-Bush” vote.
>
>This charge is a smear, but Nader is vulnerable to it because of his
>unprincipled decision to seek the nomination of the Reform Party, which
>supported right-wing Republican Patrick Buchanan in 2000. In a few states,
>local Republicans have mobilized on Nader’s behalf, with the result that
>the “independent” candidate has become something of a political pawn in the
>conflict between the two main bourgeois parties.
>
>In Michigan, after the top state election official, Terri Lyn Land, a
>Republican, ruled that Nader was not entitled to the Reform Party line
>because of a split in that organization, the state Republican Party
>apparatus went to work and collected 45,000 signatures to put him on the
>ballot. Nader initially rejected this Republican support, declaring he had
>“nothing to do with it,” but then reversed himself and agreed to accept the
>signatures collected on his behalf.
>
>In a letter to Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe, posted on his
>campaign web site, Nader writes, “I have always said we reject
>organizational help from any major Party. As for individual contributions,
>I’ll bet our major donations from individual Democrats far exceed major
>donations from individual Republicans in part because they want your Party
>to be pulled toward more progressive programs and away from its corporate
>grip and its corporate executive contributors.”
>
>This assertion is confirmed by a study by the Center for Responsive
>Politics, the leading analyst of campaign finance reports, which found that
>only 4 percent of Nader’s funding came from donors who had also given to
>Republicans. These same Republican donors gave more money to Democrats
>($66,000), than to Nader ($54,000).
>
>The Socialist Equality Party has well-known and irreconcilable differences
>with the politics of Ralph Nader. He is a defender of the capitalist system
>whose program is well within the boundaries of official bourgeois politics,
>representing an eclectic mixture of left-sounding demands (US withdrawal
>from Iraq) and right-wing nostrums (trade protectionism, chauvinist attacks
>on immigration).
>
>But these political differences in no way prevent the SEP from supporting
>Nader’s right to run for president, to campaign for political support for
>his views, and to appear on the ballot. The SEP has collaborated with
>supporters of Nader, as well as the Greens and Libertarians, in challenges
>to reactionary ballot rules in Illinois and Ohio, and will do so in other
>states where it is appropriate.
>
>Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Democratic Party attack on
>Nader’s right to run is the tacit endorsement of these anti-democratic
>tactics by the US media. Nearly three million people voted for Nader in
>2000—more than the population of half the 50 states. The Democratic Party
>is brazenly seeking to suppress the democratic rights of those who would be
>inclined to vote for Nader in this year’s election. Yet the media reports
>this neutrally, or even sympathetically.
>
>One can only imagine the public furor if a US political party openly
>advocated suppressing the voting rights of a comparably sized group—say,
>public school teachers, Jews, or people of South Asian descent. Yet there
>is no such reaction to the suppression of the Nader vote.
>
>Only one other group as numerous as Nader voters has been disenfranchised
>in the United States—convicted felons released from prison, who are denied
>the right to vote by reactionary laws in many states. The similarity is
>worth considering. The two big business parties come close to criminalizing
>third-party candidates and those who support them. That is a measure, not
>of their strength or public support, but of their weakness and fear of any
>challenge to a political structure that is corrupt and openly subservient
>to the interests of a financial oligarchy.
>
>
>
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