alph Nader obtained a ticket for last night's presidential debate, but organizers kept the event purely Democratic and Republican by turning away the Green Party candidate at the door.
''It's already been decided that whether or not you have a ticket you are not welcome in the debate,'' John Bezeris, a representative of the debate commission, told Nader.
''I didn't expect they would be so crude and so stupid,'' Nader said after being turned away. ''This is the kind of creeping tyranny that has turned away so many voters from the electoral process.''
Nader, who took the subway to the debate site at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, had received the ticket as a gift from a college student outside a campaign stop at Harvard.
Todd Tavares, a 21-year-old transfer student at Northeastern University, said he received the ticket from his roommate, a University of Massachusetts at Boston student who won entry through the campus lottery and hoped to have him pass it on to Nader.
The refusal to admit Nader into the audience of about 900 people meant that Nader had to join third-party candidates Patrick J. Buchanan and Harry Browne on the sidelines during last night's debate.
The trio had each spent the day quite differently.
Buchanan said he planned to watch the debate from a suite at the Westin hotel several miles from the campus.
In the meantime, over lunch at The Palm, Buchanan ruminated about the election, when 5 percent of the vote would be enough to qualify his Reform Party in 2004 for public funds.
Without reaching that benchmark, the Reform Party may wither and die - unless, in Buchanan's opinion, George W. Bush drags the Republicans to their third consecutive White House loss despite making an appeal to the center.
In that case, there will be a ''civil war'' inside the GOP, and the Texas governor would become the de facto ''biological father of a new Reform Party,'' Buchanan said with a touch of glee.
He also said his campaign will focus on states, including California and many in the Northeast, that are heavily favored to side with Gore, reasoning that disenfranchised Republicans may see their votes for Bush as a waste.
Casting a ballot for Buchanan, he argued, could have an impact.
''Give us a vote,'' Buchanan said, ''and build a fighting new party.''
But what if Buchanan's pull, however weak, costs Bush the election?
''I don't have any obligation,'' Buchanan snapped, ''to the Republican Party.''
While Buchanan sourly accepted his fate on the sidelines yesterday, Libertarian Harry Browne unsuccessfully challenged his in court, where a judge threw out a suit that would have allowed the candidate to participate in the debate.
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Gordon Doerfer denied the request, saying the Libertarians had failed to act until yesterday despite knowing for several weeks that Browne would be excluded.
''In short, the plaintiffs have slept on their rights by waiting until the last minute to seek relief and are not entitled to make such belated claims,'' Doerfer wrote.
Nader, meanwhile, used his day for active campaigning.
The Green Party candidate, who made stops in Amherst, Worcester, and Cambridge, sent a thrill of hope through his supporters when he hinted in midafternoon that he had a ticket to gain entry to the debate, which limited participation to those polling at least 15 percent support.
However, not all Nader supporters were elated.
Some who attended his rally at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst saw their cars, albeit illegally parked in the rush to hear the speech, get towed and tagged, to the tune of $125.
''There will be organizing around this as well,'' huffed William Hesse, a graduate student in computer science who was incensed that the university towed his Honda Civic while he was listening to Nader.
Sasha Pfeiffer of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
