Florida and Governor Jeb Bush, the president's brother, were once more at the center of a legal row over the presidential election on Tuesday, after his administration intervened to ensure independent presidential hopeful Ralph Nader remained on the state ballot.
Florida Democrats, fearing Nader will take votes away from them, accused the state government of flouting a court order last Wednesday that removed the veteran consumer activist from the ballot, on the grounds that the group sponsoring him, the Reform party, was not a nationally recognized party.
Nader's lawyers challenged the verdict but his name remained off the state ballot pending the appeal. However, Florida's secretary of state, Glenda Hood, has stepped in and submitted her own appeal which automatically suspended the court order, putting Nader back in the running just in time for absentee ballots to be posted to 50,000 US soldiers and other overseas voters by Saturday's deadline.
"This is blatant political maneuvering by Jeb Bush to give his brother a leg-up on election day," the Florida Democratic party's chairman, Scott Maddox, said. "And it's just plain wrong."
Once Nader's name was on absentee ballots, the state government would use the fact to strengthen the case to include it on all ballots across Florida on election day, Maddox claimed.
Democrats also pointed out that Nader's campaign had hired a Republican lawyer, Kenneth Sukhia, who worked for Bush in the dramatic 2000 election recount, as proof that the White House was conniving in Nader's efforts to get onto the ballot.
Democratic outrage was fueled when Hood's office blamed Hurricane Ivan, which is bearing down on the southern US, for its unusual intervention on behalf of a third-party candidate.
A hearing on the case had been scheduled for tomorrow, but state elections director Dawn Roberts claimed that Ivan might make that hearing impossible and potentially deny Nader's right to be on the ballot.
"There remains a substantial question as to when such a hearing on the permanent injunction will be held, considering the track of Hurricane Ivan," Roberts argued in a memorandum to county election supervisors who had just ordered new ballots printed without Nader's name.
Hood denied that the state government was taking sides, but simply intervening to ensure that nobody's democratic rights were infringed.
"We are acting as an honest broker," she said.
Bush's administration was the focus of complaints in 2000, when thousands of black Floridians were removed from electoral lists because they were wrongly classified as former felons without voting rights.
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