Ralph Nader’s bid to get on the Texas ballot has been rejected by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The state ballot without Nader has already been certified and sent to all 254 Texas counties.
Nader tried to get on the ballot by collecting voter signatures, but his campaign submitted them two weeks after the May deadline. His attorneys argued the state had no legitimate reason to have different requirements for independent and third-party candidates.
Nader was required to collect at least 64,076 signatures by May 10 from registered voters who did not vote in the Democratic or Republican primaries. That equals 1 percent of all votes cast for president in the most recent election in Texas.
Third-party candidates needed to collect 45,540 signatures by May 24, the day Nader’s campaign turned in its signatures. State officials argue the signature and time requirements were not unreasonable and could have been met with a better effort by Nader’s group.
Of the 80,000 signatures Nader’s campaign filed in May, a random sample by the state showed that between 56,215 and 63,374 were valid. Those numbers would have qualified Nader under the third-party access rules but not as an independent candidate.
I guess I can officially stop worrying about how Nader will affect Democratic vote totals in Texas this year. Whew!
A Debate of Sorts
The Green and Libertarian presidential nominees were to debate today on the West Mall of the UT-Austin campus (apparently it was moved inside to the Union, not sure why). I was planning on listening to a few minutes of the…