Ralph Nader will be one of the guests on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday morning interview show, on February 24. Thanks to Jack Ross and Thomas Jones for this news. Here is a link to a story about the appearance, from the Associated Press.

The AP story is incorrect to say that Nader got .3% of the vote in November 2004. He received .4% (more precisely, .381%). The article is also deficient to fail to note that Nader did not injure John Kerry in 2004. Both election returns analysis, and poll data from late October 2004, showed that Nader voters were somewhat more likely to vote for George Bush than John Kerry, if they couldn’t vote for Nader. See the Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, page one, for the story about the poll data. See the print version of Ballot Access News, January 1, 2005, for the election returns evidence. Nader’s best state in 2004 was Alaska, and his best county in the U.S. in 2004 was Grand County, Utah. In three-fourths of the states in which Nader was on the ballot in 2004, his best county in that particular state was more in favor of Bush than that state as a whole.

Neither of the bills to improve Oklahoma ballot access have made any headway, and now it is too late for them to advance. SB 28 and HB 1359 were introduced last year. Oklahoma has two-year legislative sessions, and the bills were theoretically alive until they missed the February 21 deadline to make some progress.

All bills to improve Oklahoma ballot access during the last ten years have met the same fate. None of them ever received a committee hearing.

February 21 was the deadline for anyone to file a challenge to the petition of a Democratic or Republican candidate seeking a place on the April 22 Pennsylvania primaries. Approximately 60 challenges were filed. Pennsylvania primary candidates need 2,000 signatures for statewide office. Some statewide offices also have county distribution requirements.

Four candidates filed for the Democratic primary for State Treasurer. They are Dennis Morrison-Wesley, Jennifer Mann, Rob McCord, and John F. Cordisco. McCord challenged Morrison-Wesley and Mann on the grounds that their petitions lacked at least 100 signatures from each of five counties.

All county distribution requirements for statewide petitions were invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969, in an Illinois case called Moore v Ogilvie. No state still has any statewide candidate petitions with county distribution requirements except Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania state courts have upheld that state’s county distribution requirements, notwithstanding Moore v Ogilvie. However, in December 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court again reiterated what it had said in Moore v Ogilvie. In Bush v Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court said, “We relied on these principles in the context of the presidential selection process in Moore v Ogilvie, where we invalidated a county-based procedure that diluted the influence of citizens in larger counties in the nominating process. There we observed that ‘the idea that one group can be granted greater voting strength than another is hostile to the one man, one vote basis of our representative government’.”

Bush v Gore gave additional new prestige to the old precedent Moore v Ogilvie, to the extent that lower courts started invalidating county distribution requirements for initiatives. Perhaps one of the challenged candidates for Pennsylvania Treasurer will notice this development in the law, and challenge the Pennsylvania county distribution requirement for statewide petitions.