csua.org/u/93i -> story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20040917/ap_on_el_pr/nader
web sites) ruled 6-1 Friday that he can run as the Reform Party presidential candidate in the November election. The decision met a Saturday deadline for mailing 25,000 ballots to overseas voters, most of them military personnel, and ended a dizzying two weeks during which Nader was on and off the ballot. "This is a case that should have been thrown out of the courts sooner," said Kevin Zeese, a spokesman for the Nader campaign.
web sites) won the state by 537 votes after three weeks of recounts and legal fighting -- much of it before Florida's high court. This year, the Reform Party of Florida submitted Nader to the state as its candidate. The Florida Democratic Party and several individual voters challenged his certification.
In state after state, Nader has become an extension of the Republican Party and their corporate backers." The key legal challenge against Nader was the contention that the Reform Party was no longer a bona fide national party and didn't nominate Nader in a national convention -- as required by Florida law -- but did it in a conference call three months earlier. Officials with the party and Nader argued that the Reform Party convention may have been small but that it had legitimately confirmed him as their presidential nominee.
But the party has seen its membership decline amid infighting in recent years. A state judge last week ordered Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Florida's top elections official, to strike Nader from the ballot. But when Hood appealed that order, an automatic suspension was triggered. On Wednesday, Circuit Judge Kevin Davey again ordered Hood to take Nader off as the case was appealed to the state's high court. Mark Herron, an attorney for the Democrats, said appealing the decision was unlikely. The Reform Party of Florida greeted the decision with relief, said spokesman Patrick Slevin. Alia Faraj, a spokeswoman for Hood, said elections supervisors would be able to meet Saturday's deadline. In Friday's majority opinion, Florida's high court wrote that it couldn't tell whether state lawmakers wanted the terms "national party" and "national convention" interpreted strictly or broadly. "In the absence of more specific statutory criteria or guidance from the Legislature, we are unable to conclude that a statutory violation occurred," the court wrote. Nader is now planning a nine-city tour of Florida at the end of the month, starting in Jacksonville and working his way south to Miami. In New Mexico on Friday, a district judge barred Nader from appearing on the state's ballot as an independent candidate for president.
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