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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 6, 2000)
Support recycling, help the environment CHOOSE ENVIRONMENTALLY TREE FREE/RECYCLED PAPERS For your copy & printing needs Now available at Campus Copy (in the €MU basement next to The Break) & at the UO Department of Printing. Say NO to neon, heavily dyed & Goldenrod papers, they contaminate the recycling process & the environment. Sponsored by the University of Oregon Envrionmental Issues Committee r ‘Nadertrading’ hits the Net ■ Green Party supporters have organized a nation-wide vote-trading campaign By Lindsay Buchele Oregon Daily Emeraid Supporters of presidential candi date Ralph Nader believe they have found a way to help Vice President A1 Gore win the general election, while helping Nader eamfive percent of the popular vote in order to receive feder al campaign financing for the Green Party in the future. Several Web sites, including the recently shut down Voteswap2000.com, set up a system where voters can take part in “voter pairing.” The system targets voters in “swing states,” or states that are so close in the polls that either Gore or Texas Gov. George W. Bush could win the elec toral votes. With pairing, Gore sup porters who live in states where Bush is predicted to win will vote for Nader. In return, Nader supporters living in swing states will vote for Gore. Nader support is strong in a num ber of swing states, including Oregon and Washington. But because he has no chance of winning the popular vote in these states, his supporters are faced with a dilemma: They can ei ther vote for Nader, attempting to help him gain the 5 percent, or they can vote for Gore, in hopes of stopping Bush from winning the presidency. Nader spokeswoman Stacy Malkan said her campaign wasn’t in terested in giving votes to Vice Presi dent Al Gore. “Some people are encouraging tac tical voting, but our campaign is en couraging people in every state to vote for Ralph Nader,” Malkan said. The web sites voteswap2000.com, nadertrader.org, voteexchange.com and winwincampaign.org either dis cuss how to set up a voter exchange or actually pair up voters through e mail. Voteswap2000.com and voteex change.com are two sights that pair voters up, something that is illegal in California and Oregon. As of Oct. 30, California Secretary of State Bill Jones notified VoteSwap2000.com it was in viola tion of California state law, which pro hibits entering into a contract where something of monetary value is given in exchange for a vote. VoteSwap2000.com then turned off its software in order to comply with the state’s law. Anytime a voter agrees to vote a particular way and enters into a verbal contract with someone else, they are in violation of the statute,” said Paddy McGuire, chief of staff in the Secretary of State’s office. McGuire said some voter trading sites are OK, because they include dis cussions and suggestions rather than actually pairing voters up. Nadertrader.org is considered a dis cussion site and is legal in Oregon. Scott Aaronson, a computer science student at the University of California, Berkeley, has been running a link off of the nadertrader.com site in support of voter exchange web sites. “Nadertrading is an excellent idea,” Aaronson said. “ It’s voting in a way that doesn’t change someone’s beliefs.” The Oregon Secretary of State’s Of fice has written to other sites that are providing voter pairing, such as vote exchange.com, asking them to stop running the site. “One difficulty with Internet com merce is so many sites are based in states that are out of our jurisdiction,” McGuire said. “There’s not a lot that can be done to stop them. ” The Associated Press contributed to this story. 1 ^ AN APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE ^ By Concerned Writers, Scholars, Artists, and Activists 2000 WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, are deeply disturbed by the continuing national campaign by Ralph Nader, which is growing ever more harmful as Election Day approaches. It is now plain that Mr. Nader is willing to make incredible statements and take unbelievable positions in order to gain the 5% of the vote he seeks. Instead of a liberal or progressive force, his campaign now seriously threatens to elect the dangerous George W. Bush to the presidency. Despite Mr. Nader’s past great achievements, and despite the good faith of his rank-and-file supporters, he has now become a wrecking-ball campaign -one that betrays the very liberal, humane and progressive values it claims to uphold. Recently, Mr. Nader has said that: ✓ IF GIVEN A CHOICE BETWEEN BUSH AND GORE, HE WOULD VOTE FOR BUSH Mr. Nader would happily throw the country to the Right, placing the Supreme Court, the rest of the federal judiciary, and the entire executive regulatory system including the Food and Drug Administration in the hands of the most retrograde elements in our political life. (Outside Magazine, August 2000; see www.outsidemagazine.com/magazine/200008/200008ciunp naderlhtm) ✓ ENVIRONMENTAL REACTIONARIES SERVE A POSITIVE FUNCTION Mr. Nader has argued that past appointments like Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt usefully serve as provocateurs for change. He has also denounced the Sierra Club and other long standing allies for their, "servile mentality in not supporting him." (New York Times, October 29. 2000; www.msnbc.com/news/481662.asp) ✓ THE REPEAL OF ROE V. WADE WOULD BE OF LITTLE CONSEQUENCE Never a champion of women's rights, Mr. Nader claims that abortion rights might just as well he left up to the states. (This Week with Sam Donaldson, October 29, 2000, transcript at www.abcnews.com) ✓ ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL SHOULD BE CUT No matter what one thinks of the current situation in the Middle East, such rhetoric is not only irresponsible, it is inflammatory. (Common Dreams News Center, October 24, 2000.) But these are only the latest thoughtless utterances from Mr. Nader. From the start, he said his effort would help the Democrats gain votes in the House of Representatives — while at the same time he has vilified the Democrats as no different than the Republicans. His supporters in various states talk about a "risk-free” Nader vote in places where (lore or Bush are strong, “even as Mr. Nader himself aggressively looks for votes in liberal cities and on college campuses in vital toss-up states." (These toss-ups now may well include California.) Should Governor Bush be elected President, and the Republicans hold the Congress, conservative Republicans will have virtually captured firm control of all three branches of the Federal Government for the first time since 1930. Mr. Nader, who is also supporting Green congressional candidates who have no chance of winning in some tight races, apparently does not care about this — or wforse, seeks it, under the naive impression that it will heighten social contradictions and lead to what he has called “a progressive convulsion”— that is, the worse, the better. This is sectarianism of a familiar sort in the century just past — a sectarianism that had reaped nothing but political catastrophe. We implore all liberal and progressive voters to reject the Nader campaign on November 7 and to vote for Gore and Lieberman. 68S010 Signatories (partial list; list in formation) Benjamin Barber, Rutgers University Paul Berman, writer and critic Michael Berube Marco Calavita, film critic Ellen Chesler, writer and critic Mitchell Cohen, City University of New York, Dissent Bogdan Denitch, City University of New York Ronald Dworkin, New York University Dagoberto Gilb, writer Todd Gitlin, New York University Francisco Goldman, writer Mary Gordon, novelist and critic Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker John B. Judis. The New Republic David Kusnet, writer and critic Jeremy Larner, writer and critic Wendy Lesser, The Threepenny Review Harold Meyerson, Los Angeles Weekly Tom Morrison. Nobel laureate, novelistand critic Jo-Ann Mort, Open Society Fund Brian Morton, novelist and critic David Osborne, writer George Packer, novelist and critic James Shapiro, Columbia University Jayne Anne Phillips, novelist Gloria Steinem, writer and activist Ruy Teixeira, Century Foundation Siva Vaidhyanathan, New York University Judith B. Walzer, formerly New School University Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Dissent Jim Weinstein, In These Times Sean Wilentz, Princeton University Oregon Daily Emerald P.O. Box 3159, Eugene OR 97403 The Oregon Daily Emerald is published daily Monday through Friday during the school year and Tuesday and Thursday during the summer by the Oregon Daily Emerald Publishing Co. Inc., at the Uni versity of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. A member of the Associated Press, the Emerald operates independently of the University with offices in Suite 300 of the Erb Memorial Union. The Emerald is pri vate property. 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