It’s official: Ralph Nader is running a Mickey Mouse campaign.

His petition to be on the… It’s official: Ralph Nader is running a Mickey Mouse campaign.

His petition to be on the Pennsylvania ballot was rejected by the Commonwealth Court, which cited thousands of dubious signatures submitted by his campaign workers. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of the 51,273 signatures submitted, a mere 18,818 were valid — and the invalid ones used names like Fred Flintstone and Mickey Mouse.

These signatures were so grievously fake that President Judge James Gardener Colins called the signature-gathering process “the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this court.” Ouch.

And there are further complications. Absentee ballots already mailed from Pennsylvania list him as a candidate; now the state will either have to correct these and send ballots anew or simply not count the votes for Nader, so that those people who voted for him will have thrown their votes away — not that their votes weren’t thrown away before.

All of this — his split with the Green Party, his hiring of a controversial Florida firm to get petitions signed — just begs the Office Space”-like question: “What would you say you do here?”

The answer: distract, self-aggrandize and don’t help third-party politics.

Nader’s third-party tactics aren’t effective in our winner-takes-all presidential elections. Unlike in parliamentary systems, where there is proportional representation — and the party with the highest proportion sets up the government — we don’t have such proportions. It’s all or nothing, and Nader’s getting nothing.

If he wanted to do some good and start a third party, he should start small — grassroots campaigns at the local and state levels to get people outside the party system interested.

Or he could try liberalizing the current political parties. Rather than proving himself a nuisance by distracting people from candidates who can actually win, he should stick to pitching his ideas — getting issues that would otherwise be ignored brought to the table — and not just to himself.

Spurred by Al Gore’s defeat in Florida by a razor-thin margin, the Democrats are now trying to court centrist and liberal votes with one candidate. It’ll take until November to see if this approach works.