Nader effort to gain ballot comes to end

BOISE — The campaign of independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader on Wednesday dropped its effort to have the longtime consumer advocate’s name printed on the Idaho ballot.

The decision came a day after Nader supporters filed the papers to qualify him as a write-in candidate on Nov. 2 and the day before 4th District Judge Joel Horton had scheduled a hearing on the Nader claim that petitions to gain ballot status were improperly disqualified.

Matthew Campbell, the Boise attorney who represented the campaign in the case, declined to comment on the reason the suit was dropped. Kevin Zeese, a spokesman for the national Nader campaign in Washington, D.C., initially said he was unaware of the decision and did not respond to later telephone requests for an explanation.

An earlier lawsuit to claim a spot on the ballot was rejected by 4th District Judge Deborah Bail on technical grounds, but she also said she found no justification for concluding Nader had been improperly denied ballot status.

The campaign has contended that nearly 900 voter signatures were rejected by clerks in Ada and Canyon counties because either addresses or signatures did not match between nominating petitions and voter registration cards. That left the campaign 600 signatures short of the threshold to be included on the ballot.

The state has objected to the last-minute timing of the legal challenges, pointing out that over 500,000 ballots have already been printed and distributed without Nader’s name and tens of thousands of them have been returned by absentee voters.