by Jim Buell
member, Prairie Greens of East Central Illinois
Ralph Nader has been struck from the Illinois ballot, but even so there is reason to hope that the Green Party ticket featuring Nader and running mate Winona LaDuke will be listed in the voting booths when November 7 rolls around. A lawsuit filed against the Illinois State Board of Elections on behalf of the veteran consumer advocate's campaign draws on recent precedents in which the Supreme Court has forced ballot access in states where arbitrary early deadlines ruled off third-party and independent candidates.
On July 17, the Illinois State Board of Elections removed Nader / LaDuke from the ballot for lack of signatures on a petition circulated by supporters statewide. Illinois law currently calls for 25,000 registered voters' signatures to be gathered in the 90 days prior to June 26 to qualify for the November 2000 ballot. The Greens garnered just short of 23,000 signatures by the deadline. On July 20, lawyers for the campaign filed suit in federal court demanding time to collect and file additional signatures. Their argument: Illinois. filing requirements represent an unconstitutional burden on essential rights of free association.
Supporters believe the Nader campaign offers a needed alternative to politics as usual. Nader criticizes the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates equally for their addiction to corporate campaign money and their pro-corporate policies. With the Greens, he espouses an alternative politics whose values include grassroots community action, ecological awareness and consensus decision-making. Many believe Nader can win the Presidency, and many more support his campaign for the issues it raises and for its potential to help the Greens grow as a party. Supporters who have circulated petitions locally include members of the Champaign County Greens, the School for Designing a Society, the Socialist Forum, and the Champaign County Living Wage Campaign. People and groups from across the political spectrum are welcome to help with this ongoing effort, because Nader's campaign in its themes of economic populism and ecologically based politics is not confined to any one point on that conventional spectrum.
In the wake of the legal challenge, Greens and other Nader supporters around Illinois are continuing to gather petition signatures and get the word out about the threat to ballot access here. Locally, supporters added 310 signatures to the post-deadline total during two days of intensive petitioning at outdoor events in Urbana in mid-July. Statewide, more than 9,100 additional signatures have been collected since the deadline. More signature-gathering efforts are in the works.
The U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on similar ballot issues before. In 1980, then-U.S. Representative John B. Anderson (R-Illinois) ran as an independent after seeking and failing to win the Republican presidential nomination. Anderson ran up against substantial ballot access restrictions, including an Ohio law which mandated that all candidates had to file petitions by mid-March, 1980, for both the Ohio primaries in June and the November general election. In Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983), the Court ruled by a 5-4 majority that the Ohio deadline violated the First and Fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution. (Anderson, incidentally, received his A.B. and J.D. from the University of Illinois in the 1940s and also taught political science on the campus for a time.)
Illinois currently has the second-earliest deadlines in the country for third party and/or independent candidates to file, combined with one of the highest signature requirements. The Illinois lawsuit is one of two filed so far by the Brennan Center for Justice on the Nader campaign. s behalf -- the other was filed May 15 in North Carolina. Elizabeth Daniel, the Center's lead counsel for the Illinois lawsuit, said, "The rationale for the suit is that the arbitrarily early deadline is meant to exclude independent and third-party candidates, that Nader is a viable national candidate expected to be on 45 state ballots, that he is polling eight to 10 percent support in several states, and that he is contributing significantly to the policy debate." The Anderson v. Celebrezze decision is a key precedent for the Brennan Center lawsuits.
Prior to this year, non-major party candidates had five additional weeks to file petitions supporting their candidacy. House Bill 1790, signed in July 1999, moved the Illinois petition deadline for minor party and independent candidates from August 6 back to June 26. It passed both houses of the legislature unanimously. Illinois, unlike most states, also imposes a start date on such petitions. Only 90 days are permitted for petitioning.
Al Zimmer, counsel for the Illinois State Board of Elections , contends that the state moved its deadline forward purely for administrative reasons. . This was done to streamline the process,. Zimmer maintained. "It. s a matter of counting backwards. The ballot needs to be certified by September 1, for example to allow 60 days for preparation of overseas ballots. The deadline was moved back to June 26 basically to allow time for adequate processing of complaints. ... Verifying signatures is itself time consuming."
Yet according to the independent watchdog newsletter Ballot Access News , Illinois has moved its deadline steadily backwards over the years, from October to late September in 1929, to early September in 1947, to early August in 1967, and to June last year. "It is ironic," the newsletter noted last November, "that as communications and printing technology have improved, election authorities need five months to do a job which their 19th century counterpoints did in only a month's time" (www.ballot-access.org/1999/1101.html).
Legal experts are relying on the Anderson v. Celebrezze case and several similar federal district court rulings from recent presidential election cycles to combat deadlines like Illinois. . But according to Daniel, such judicial decisions do not occur in a vacuum. "In courts that have looked at these cases before," the Brennan Center lawyer says, "the courts often looked at support for the candidate in the state and around the country." It is for this reason that Greens around Illinois are continuing to collect signatures on the Nader/LaDuke nominating petition. As Daniel put it, "Continuing to collect signatures shows that the arbitrary deadline is what is keeping us off the ballot, not lack of support."
The additional signatures could also be needed for adding Nader to the ballot if the lawsuit leads to an extension of time to file petitions, rather than to a judicial order granting a ballot listing outright. While over 32,000 signatures have been collected to date, nominating petitions are often subject to line-by-line "shotgun" challenges like the one which led to the initial disqualification of the Nader petition. These challenges require county clerks to match each signer's name with a current signature and address on the voter rolls; according to veteran petitioners, forty to fifty percent of petition signatures may be declared invalid at this stage. Therefore, to obtain 25,000 valid signatures it may be necessary to collect a total of 40,000 to 50,000 signatures.
Locally, anyone who would like to sign or collect other registered Illinois voters' signatures on the ballot petition can contact the Prairie Greens of East Central Illinois via email: greens@prairienet.org. The group also holds meetings the first Tuesday of each month and maintains a website at www.prairienet.org/greens/ . There are plans to form a registered campus organization at the U of I in the fall to support the Nader/LaDuke candidacy and other Green Party issues.
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