On August 10, Ralph Nader filed this opening brief in Nader v Federal Election Commission. The Democratic Party and many of its close allies spent millions of dollars to remove Nader from ballots in 18 states in 2004, but didn’t follow federal campaign laws when it made these expenditures. Nader had then complained to the FEC, but the FEC not only didn’t enforce the law, it didn’t even notify the Democratic Party about the Nader complaint. Nader then sued the FEC in U.S. District Court, but the U.S. District Court, though agreeing that the FEC had not followed the law, said the FEC had only committed “harmless error.” Nader asks the U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn the U.S. District Court decision.

Part of the reason this case was filed so many years after the 2004 election is that the FEC did nothing with the complaint for several years.