The Libertarians’ paid petitioners collected 783 signatures for the Green Party of Virginia. The Green petition drive collected a total of 14,400 raw signatures, and we needed 10,000 valid signatures to make the ballot. It’s quite possible that the Libertarians put us over the top.

-I don’t always catch the typos on the BlackBerry.

I disagree with Nader’s political views, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating all the independent/third party advocacy and cooperation he’s helped with.

Dondero should go back to his war-mongering playground.

“The Nader campaign did not cause the LP to fail to make the ballot in any state. In fact, if the LP had not been able to utilize petitioners that were hired by the Nader campaign to also work LP petitions the LP would have failed to make the ballot in even more states than it did.”

The Nader campaign would’ve NEVER been able to make it on all 45 ballot plus Washington D.C. w/o the support of the LP. It goes both ways.

Thank you for your honesty Andy. It has been an absolute pleasure working with you thus far. You are an outstanding petitioner & a team player. Keep at it!

“Pretty ironic, that Ralph Nader is all of a sudden standing up for free elections and signature gatherer’s rights, when it was PRECISELY! his people, the “Nader’s Raiders” signature gatherers who blocked Libertarian Party petitioners from gathering signatures at locations all throughout Ohio, New England region and other States for Bob Barr in 2008.

Nader is a Fascist, and his supporters nothing less than Liberal-Authoritarian Thugs.

Pretty pathetic that Ron Paul would have anything to do with this scumbag.”

I have no idea where these allegations are coming from, they were never brought to my attention. The Nader Campaign worked well with libertarians in the past. I’m sorry Eric experienced what he did.

I ran into Nader petitioners in several states and never had a problem with them. Most of the time they were also carrying LP, but when I saw them in Illinois they were only carrying Nader (I’m pretty sure that Illinois prohibits petitioners from gathering signatures on more than one candidate petition) and they never gave me any problems.

Also, as I said above, most of the petitioners hired by the Nader campaign as well as the LP as well as most petitioners in general are not idealogues. The majority of them are people who are just out to make a buck, and this includes most of the people hired to do voter registration by ACORN.

When I am out gathering signatures and I run into another petitioner who is working on something different than I’m working I try to work with them. In other words, since we are doing something different, I will say something like, “OK, you refer people to me and I’ll refer people to you.” (as in I’ll ask people I stop to check out your petititon and you should ask people you stop to check out my petition). This usually works just fine.

The general rule in petitioning is first come first serve at a location. That is whichever petitioner gets there first should have the spot and other petitioners who arrive later should leave. However, if a location is large enough, say there are multiple doors or it is a festival or college campus or something like that, then more than one petitioner can work there and they should spread out.

If it is a one door spot then it should be for one petitioner, however, if another petitioner is working on something different than I’m working and if there is room for that petitioner to stand, I generally don’t have a problem with that person working along side me (as long as they aren’t creating a disturbance).

Some petitioners are reasonable people, but just like in every group there are a few bad apples who will try to jump in front of other petitioners even if they arrived at a location first and who will act like jackasses.

I doubt that the Nader campaign itself had anything to do with any misconduct that may have gone on from petitioners. And, as much as I dislike ACORN, any misconduct that may have occurred from people working for ACORN was probably due to them being random jackasses and was not an official policy of the organization.

I think that in most states a person can sign petitions for more than one candidate or party, but there are some states where you can only sign for one party. Dondero mentioned Ohio, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. A person can sign for more than one candidate/party in Ohio and Connecticut, but in New Hampshire a person can only sign for one candidate/party. In a situation where a person can only sign one of the petitions I could see more problems of petitioners butting heads occurring.

Another problem is that in most states it is difficult to get locations where you can ask people to sign petitions without getting kicked out. In such places whatever places where you can petition without getting kicked out tend to get overrun with petitions if there are multiple petitioners working in the same area. This type of situation can cause problems with petitioners butting heads over locations, but this problem is mainly due to suppression of free speech and petition rights at various locations.

So, of course, we ended Alabama early, since they also brought in another crew there for no good reason whatsoever, and ended up working in Alabama with only the Constitution Party left on our boards out of the original three (Barr, Nader, Baldwin).”

It should be pointed out that the IDIOTIC and IRRATIONAL decisions mentioned above were all made by the disgraced former LP Political Director, Sean Haugh. It was Sean Haugh who caused the LP to fail to make the ballot in Connecticut and Maine, and he also played a role (either directly or indirectly) in other ballot access failures that occurred in 2008 (including causing some regional candidates (as in people running for state legislature) to fail to make the ballot in Pennsylvania).

Sean Haugh is a menace to ballot access and should be kept far away from having anything to do with ballot access or any other position in the party for that matter. The entire Libertarian Party SHOULD BE pissed off at Sean Haugh because he caused thousands of dollars of donor’s money to be squandered on failed ballot access drives (drives that COULD HAVE been successful had he not fucked them up).

It’s either that, or he’s in the bathroom “stretching on the edge of the bathtub” for an hour. Like right now, for example. It never fails; if I always went to work at the same time, you could probably set your clock by it.

I’m assuming you meant ‘I don’t think there’s any reason not to give them the option…’

A fair enough point. I generally don’t see why political parties should have to deal with restrictive electoral laws in the first place. But fusion is quite low on my list of desired electoral reforms.

In fact, it’s not even on my list. Fusion is a good red-herring for the establishment parties to get behind, making it look like they’re trying to reform the electoral system. They can happily get behind fusion, knowing that in the absence of major reforms, fusion only props up their power by co-opting dissatisfied voters into ‘paper parties’ that sell their ballot lines to the Republicrats.