With two weeks left in its petition drive, the Iowa Nader for President Committee will most likely get long-time consumer activist Ralph Nader on the presidential ballot for the state of Iowa, said the group’s coordinator Mark Brown.

“We need 1,500 signatures in the state of Iowa from at least 10 counties to get him on the ballot,” he said. “We may have the entire amount right now.”

Brown, who graduated from Iowa State in 1993, said there have been people across the state working independently to get Nader’s name on the ballot. When Brown contacted the Green party, he found out who was circulating petitions across Iowa. He was then able to coordinate the efforts by having everyone circulate the same petition, instead of several separately written petitions.

“Everybody in the state right now, to my knowledge, is circulating the same petition,” he said. Currently there are 50 to 60 individuals circulating petitions and, Brown said, nine have more than 1,000 signatures.

After collecting the signatures from the people circulating petitions, Brown said, he will file the paperwork sometime prior to Aug. 16, the state’s deadline for the ballot petitions.

Andrew Chebuhar is the president of Citizens for Nader, the ISU student organization that has circulated petitions around the campus. He said his organization has at least 1,000 signatures but have not collected them all yet.

“The reason he agreed to run,” Chebuhar said, “is he wants to stimulate a debate and get people involved. He wants to stimulate debate on the distribution of power, its abuses and ways to reform that and some other subjects that are neglected by the major party candidates and the mainstream media.”

Nader came to the ISU campus in February of 1995 and spoke on “The politics of technology.”

He first hit the American scene in 1965, when he wrote the book Unsafe at Any Speed, and has since written several consumer safety books.

Nader will be running as the candidate for the Green party. “The Green party is the largest progressive organization in the United States at this time. Nader is interested in building actual democracy and so this can only come from a grass roots campaign,” Brown said.

“In a grass roots movement, funding is a lot more limited and you have to be very careful in how you spend your funding and how you communicate your message,” he added.

Most of the advertising, he said, would not say, ‘This is why you should vote for me.’ Instead, the advertising would ask people to come to public meetings to ask questions about Nader.

Brown said, “To me, the real issue is can the grass roots movement successfully communicate with the 60 percent group [who do not usually vote] and get them to the polls? There’s a lot of apathy; there’s a lot of fear; there’s a lot of inertia.

“I think it’s possible to get him elected if we can get them to the polls in the fall.”

Brown said people who are interested in the Iowa Nader for President Committee can contact him at his Colo residence at (515)377-2856. Chebuhar said people in Ames who are interested can reach him at 296-4737.