Oregon Nader backers try again
SALEM, Ore. — Hoping the third time is the charm, Ralph Nader’s supporters turned in what they said were more than enough valid signatures to place Nader on Oregon’s Nov. 2 presidential ballot.
Two earlier mini-conventions held by Nader’s backers had failed to generate enough signatures to place the 70-year-old consumer activist on the ballot as an independent candidate.
Nader supporters arrived at the secretary of state’s office Tuesday with four cartons of signatures from a dozen counties. Anne Martens, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, said the Nader supporters turned in 18,186 names. At least 15,306 valid signatures were needed to qualify.
State election officials must make sure petition sheets were properly filled out by circulators before Nader is officially certified for the ballot.
Nader’s opponents said Tuesday they plan challenges to try to keep Nader off the ballot on grounds that there was widespread fraud in his petition drive, an allegation the Nader camp denies.
Nader’s Oregon campaign chief, Greg Kafoury, said the apparent success of the latest drive came despite efforts by Democrats and their union allies to “sabotage” Nader’s drive by bullying his signature gatherers.
“People resent the fact that the Democrats sicked a big-time law firm and a union on us,” Kafoury said.
But the Service Employees International Union, a public employee union that is backing Democratic nominee John Kerry, said the Nader campaign waited until the last day or so before Tuesday’s deadline to “dump” thousands of signatures on local election officials. The result was that some counties didn’t have enough time to properly check them, it said.
“Clearly, there have been many problems, and obviously one alternative is to go to the courts,” union spokesman Mark Weiner said. “We’ll have to see what the secretary of state does with the petitions.”
Both parties view Nader as a potential spoiler who could draw votes from Kerry and help President Bush in Oregon this fall.
Recent polls, however, have shown that Nader’s support in Oregon has dropped since the 2000 election, when he got 5 percent of the Oregon vote in one of the closest presidential contests. In that race, Democrat Al Gore defeated Bush by less than 1 percent of the vote.
A Zogby International poll published in Tuesday’s online version of the Wall Street Journal showed Kerry with 53.9 percent support among Oregon voters compared with 42.6 percent for Bush and 1.5 percent for Nader. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
Still, Kafoury insisted that Nader will offer Oregon’s progressive voters who oppose the war in Iraq an alternative to Kerry, whom he said isn’t much different from Bush when it comes to pursuing the war.
“Kerry says, ‘I’ll make the war work,’.” Kafoury said. “Nader would get out of Iraq in six months.”