Commonwealth Court has ordered a marathon review of Ralph Nader's nominating petitions, to culminate in 10 hearings across the state which will collectively assess whether his campaign submitted enough valid signatures to secure a spot on Pennsylvania's presidential ballot.

At the hearings Monday, election officials, attorneys for Nader and the attorneys challenging his petitions are to present the results of the inspections of more than 50,000 signatures collected by the Nader campaign.

Nader needs 25,697 signatures to run as an independent, but the attorneys allied with the Democratic Party contend that more than half of those submitted should be discarded for a variety of reasons, such as they come from individuals who are not registered to vote, or that they are duplicates, or because the signature does not exactly match that on the voter's registration card.

Between now and the hearings, the court ordered the attorneys in the case to be available from 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., including Saturday and Sunday, to jointly scrutinize the petitions originally submitted in August to election officials in counties across the state.

The order says that county election officials should be prepared to testify about the validity of any signatures that the two sides cannot agree on.

The proceedings are the result of a Supreme Court decision Monday which reversed an earlier Commonwealth Court decision barring Nader from the ballot on grounds unrelated to the issue of valid signatures.