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- Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader (born February 27, 1934) is an activist who targets large American corporations on environmental and consumer rights issues. He was an independent candidate in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. He also received the Reform Party endorsement. His running mate was Peter Camejo.
He was also the U.S. presidential candidate of the Green Party in 1996 and 2000. In both runs Winona LaDuke was his vice-presidential running mate. In 2004, however, the Green Party nominated David Cobb.

- Ballot access
On April 5, 2004, Nader failed in an attempt to get on the Oregon ballot. "Unwritten rules" disqualified over 700 valid voter signatures, all of which had already been verified by county elections officers, who themselves signed and dated every sheet with an affidavit of authenticity (often with a county seal as well). This subtraction left Nader 218 short of the 15,306 needed. He vowed to gather the necessary signatures in a petition drive. Secretary of State Bill Bradbury disqualified many of his signatures as fraudulent; the Marion County Circuit Court ruled that this action was unconstitutional as the criteria for Bradbury's disqualifications were based upon "unwritten rules" not found in electoral code, but the state Supreme Court ultimately reversed this ruling. Nader has presently appealed this decision to the US Supreme Court, but a decision did not arrive before the 2004 election.
On September 18, 2004, the Florida Supreme Court ordered that Nader be included on the 2004 ballot in Florida as the Reform Party candidate. The court rejected the arguments that the Reform Party did not meet the requirements of the Florida election code for access to the ballot — that the party must be a "national party" and that it must have nominated its candidate in a "national convention" — and therefore Nader should have attempted to file as an independent candidate. Specifically, the court ruled that the term "national party" must be interpreted as broadly as possible. The Reform Party has a ballot line in only some U.S. states.
In the general election, Nader appeared on the ballot in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Ballot access ultimately became one of the most significant issues of the Nader campaign - in his concessions speech, Nader characterized it as a "civil liberties issue" and noted that Democratic attempts to challenge his ballot access were rejected in the "overwhelming majority" of state courts.

- Results
Nader received many fewer votes than he had in 2000, dropping from about 2.9 million votes (2.74 percent of the popular vote) to just over 400,000 (0.34 percent). He finished only about 20,000 votes ahead of the fourth-place candidate, Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party. Fears that Nader would play a "spoiler" role for the Democrats proved unfounded, however -- Kerry's margins of loss in states won by Bush were all substantially larger than the percentage of votes gathered by Nader.


Note to readers: Which means, Nader garnered less than 1% of the total electoral votes. Which was already speculated very early in the election campaign trail by both Bush and Kerry camps. In about as early as I can remember, both camps had already announced the Green party as a non-threat. Ironically enough, to cut the long story short, Nader and his party allegedly accepted some independent pro-Bush campaign's money to support his own campaign trial, which made anti-Nader people (there actually are people who find it worthwell to go against a nice man like him!) and detractors implicitly suggest that Nader prefers George W. Bush over John Kerry, which helped Bush inturn!

At least this man had a dream and went for it strong! Applause people, applause!!!