Help From The Homeless

By William Han

One state in which Ralph Nader's candidacy could have a major impact this November is Pennsylvania, where Al Gore won by a narrow margin in 2000. Nader needs 25,697 signatures there to get on the ballot, and his campaign has turned in 45,000. But Democrats are challenging the petitions, claiming many of the names are repeated several times, as is the same handwriting, a practice known as round-robin signing. Part of the problem, opponents claim, lies with the people Nader hired to collect signatures: the homeless from Philadelphia's streets. Some of those homeless workers aren't too happy either. They have filed a lawsuit claiming Nader still owes them back pay. The Nader campaign says it paid all the homeless workers except those who turned in flawed signatures, and it insists that staff members vetted all the petition signatures and discarded the fraudulent ones. The challenges are "just another one of those lawsuits that try to make Nader's integrity look worse," says Kevin Zeese, a Nader spokesman.

--By William Han