Democrats tighten noose on Nader and Greens in punitive attack on "Third Party" candidates

Democrats tighten noose on Nader and Greens in punitive attack on "Third Party" candidates
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"If successful in Pennsylvania, Democrat legislators around the country will likely introduce similar punitive election laws in other states, particularly "swing" states, in a preventive effort to keep independents and minor party candidates off the ballot."
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This is just the kinda thing I was talking about in this previous post. The major parties run the show, and they--in this case, it's the Dems, but with other minors, it's the Republicans--do everything possible to keep any competition on their side of the political spectrum out of the race.

Obviously, this benefits the major parties, but it doesn't benefit the people who vote, and whose choices are thusly limited by these actions. It doesn't benefit the marketplace of political ideas & ideals, when all but two (& sometimes less than two) positions are swept away from that marketplace.

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"Judge James Collins, who assessed the $89,821 bill, led the review declaring Nader's petitions were "rife with forgeries" and that "this signature gathering process was the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this Court." Collins alleged that "thousands of names" were "created at random"…a view dissented from by Justice Saylor of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court who declared the Nader campaign had not been shown to have engaged in any kind of "systemic" fraud and that only 687 signatures out of 51,273 had actually been rejected for forgery.

Professor Brown has discovered that Judge Collins personally ruled that 568 of the 687 purported forgeries were fraudulent leaving the other ten judges to find only 119 forgeries. Collins and two of the other reviewing judges discarded thousands of signatures on very "technical and complicated" criteria including a missing middle initial, use of ditto marks, or mixing printing with cursive writing. Collins ended up rejecting 70% of the 10,794 signatures he reviewed."
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It smells awful fishy to me that one guy found so many forgeries, while ten other judges found so few. I realize that this may be a partisan article about a partisan review (I know nothing about the author of this article, or the law professor who conducted the review), but it does merit further inquiry, as far as I'm concerned...

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Brown writes there was a "concerted Democratic program to purge Nader from the presidential ballot." Further, "The lesson to be drawn from the 2004 presidential race is that neither major party can be trusted to police a general election ballot. Major party interests naturally lean more toward rigging and sabotaging than insuring fair and competitive fights."
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That's what I think, too... There ought to be a better way...