Don’t vote for Ralph Nader. I know you Naderites love the man. He’s done many things to improve our country in the past several decades. To honor his goals and see any of them become policy in the next four years, you must vote for Al Gore in tomorrow’s election.

It’s time to face facts. Nader has no chance of becoming president. The 5 percent he currently holds are 5 percent out of Gore’s lead and are the main reason he’s behind in the polls and deadlocked in the Electoral College. You might be saying the winner of this election doesn’t matter because Bush and Gore are the same person, but do you honesty believe that?

That unfounded statement is the cornerstone of the Nader campaign.You won’t accept this assertion from a two-bit, Gore-loving columnist like me, but perhaps you’ll listen to the New York Times. “Ralph Nader and his supporters are not simply being delusional when they say there is no real difference between these candidates. They are being dishonest and dangerously so.”

If you’re still unconvinced, consider the open letter written to Nader by 13 original Nader’s Raiders: “To ask voters to support your candidacy on the basis that there are no major differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties is a serious misstatement of fact.” Gore and Bush are not the same. More specifically, Gore’s quite a bit better.

It is in your best interests to vote for him. I empathize with your idealism and the courage of voting your conscience, but I urge you to realize the implications of your vote.

George Bush hails from a state with one of the worst environmental records in the nation. Gore is behind. If he loses tomorrow, those of you who opted for Nader must shoulder on your conscience the knowledge that you had a hand in whatever environmental atrocities occur under the following administration, along with the respective setbacks in civil rights, women’s rights and America’s economic prosperity.

Do you want that on your conscience? The Los Angeles Weekly doesn’t. The paper gave Ralph Nader a conditional endorsement, citing that “Defeating Governor Bush must be the paramount concern of progressive voters this November. Behind Dubya’s happy face lurks forces that want to turn America in the 21st Century into a New Age version of America in the 19th.” Even Nader’s Raiders asked him to yield. They asked him to “step aside in the best interests of our nation.”

It was never Nader’s intention to win the office. Garnering the 5 percent he needs for federal funding is a close second, but his primary reason for running in this election was to tip the scales in Bush’s favor and propel the under-qualified Republican governor into office. He believes that more people will listen to him under an anti-environmental presidency. The Los Angeles Times reported that he said, “If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anesthetizer, I’d rather have a provocateur. It would mobilize us.”

The New York Times quoted him saying that “A bumbling Texas governor would galvanize the environmental community as never before.”

Still, America should not have to suffer four years for the benefit of Nader’s high-stakes membership drive.

Consider Al Gore. Unlike Bush, he would further your environmental ideals. Gore is a qualified candidate with 24 years of public service, during which he tackled many environmental initiatives.

Go to his Web site and check out his resume. The Clinton/Gore administration secured over $11 billion for the surface and satellite monitoring of climate change. They cleaned up 525 toxic waste sites — three times more than the combined efforts of the Reagan and Bush administrations. The Department of Defense toxic chemical releases fell 64.8 percent from 1994 to 1998. That’s pretty impressive, admit it.

The stakes in this election are too high to risk another Bush administration. The Sierra Club, United Steelworkers of America, the National Organization for Women, and many other organizations insist that for our nation to move forward, Bush must be stopped.

In a letter to Nader, Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group wrote, “Virtually everything the environmental community has achieved over the past 30 years could be at stake.”

Indeed, there is much at stake in this election.

We could have an intelligent, ecologically conscious president who fights for us, or we could not.

The choice is yours.

However, I won’t carry the knowledge that I helped elect Bush on my conscious.