On Monday (August 23), the office of the Virginia attorney general, according to The New York Times, in an article by the Associated Press, reversed itself from a Friday ruling and held that the state's Board of Elections had to accept Ralph Nader's petitions to be on the presidential ballot. Previously, according to The Times, election officials — on earlier advice from the attorney general's office — had rejected his papers because the papers had not been grouped by congressional districts.
How did the Nader group "get around" the grouping requirement? Here's how: The A.G.'s office said that there was no evidence that the grouping requirement had ever been approved by the Board.
So how can you use this squib in your practice? Never assume that a rule can be used against you just because it's in print. There are a variety of ways to overcome rules. Nader's group used one of those ways: The rule wasn't valid because it had never been validly enacted.
Also, it didn't hurt that Jerry W. Kilgore, the Virginia attorney general, is state chairman for Bush's reelection campaign. The Times, in the last sentence of its article, reports that the A.G.'s spokesman "denied any partisan considerations in [the] reversal."
If you want some local color about the contest and what happened when the Nader people tried to file their petitions, you can go to this report. The report also includes a description about how one Nader worker who was unhappy about not having been paid for his petitions nearly caused a vehicle collision with another Nader worker.
Posted by ajlevy at August 25, 2004 3:30 PM