Hurricane Ralph

I found this the other day and never did anything with it. It's an opinion piece in the Palm Beach Post on the initial decision to include Ralph Nader on the Florida ballot:

Then on Monday, [Secretary of State Glenda]Hood appealed Judge Davey's order and told the supervisors to include Mr. Nader. She said that if appeals courts support Judge Davey, any votes for Mr. Nader won't be counted. During an interview, Ms. Hood blamed Judge Davey for waiting several days to hear other arguments and cited the approach of Hurricane Ivan — "the Panhandle is where most of our military voters live" — as reason for a decision.

But this decision? Ms. Hood said her office has a "responsibility to voters to make sure they are able to exercise the right to vote." The right to vote isn't at stake; just whether people can vote for Mr. Nader. And just weeks ago, Ms. Hood spent $150,000 fighting release of a predictably flawed list of supposed felons who couldn't vote. In that case, she was ready to disenfranchise people thought to vote Democratic. And if there's a time crunch, that's the fault of Mr. Nader, who couldn't find a lawyer, but at the last minute lucked into Kenneth Sukhia, who just happened to have worked for Mr. Bush during the 2000 recount.

Another point that jumps out is Ms. Hood's idea to throw out all votes for Nader if the appeal court finds his addition illegal and then say you are defending voters ability to exercise their vote. If you throw out the Nader votes, you are disenfranchising those people by making their vote not count. And who's to say how they would have voted without Nader on the ballot.

These statements make it even clearer that Hood's motivation is to get more Bush votes than Kerry votes any way she can.