This coming Tuesday marks the fortieth anniversary of the Kent State shootings, an occasion that should give pause to everyone, not just we Ohioans, to reflect on the nature of our public debate and discourse, and what happens when those in power abuse their privilege.  In Ohio, though, this day will be even more significant, as we have primary elections for state offices that day (as well as a couple of state issues to vote on), and for the first time there will be more than two parties on the ballot.

Until recently, Ohio’s laws regarding recognition of political parties was tilted very unfairly towards the two establishment parties.  Just getting a third-party candidate onto a ballot required many times more signatures than a Republican or Democratic candidate, and gaining official recognition from the state as a political party was all but impossible.  Even if a third-party candidate got on the ballot, his or her party affiliation was not published, unlike the candidates of the establishment parties.  As usual, Republicans and Democrats colluded to ensure that this arrangement withstood, so as to give themselves an effective duopoly on state politics.  Nowhere was this more clear than in the 2004 presidential campaign, when Ohio Democrats worked tirelessly not just to make sure Ralph Nader would not be on the November ballot, but also that write-in votes for him would not be tallied.  If the Democrats in this state had spent that effort on making John Kerry a more electable candidate instead, and flipped just 60,000 votes from Bush to Kerry, Kerry would have been elected president.

In 2008, though, the Ohio Supreme Court stepped in and ruled Ohio’s election system unconstitutional.  This meant that all candidates appeared on the 2008 presidential ballot, with their party affiliations listed.  The Secretary of State then ordered the state to recognize all third parties, and next week’s primary elections will be the first in which third parties will get to use the state’s election resources to conduct their primaries.  In the past, when I voted in the Green Party’s primaries, I had to vote by e-mail, and the state Green Party had to tabulate the results by themselves.

The reason why this is so important in Ohio is that the only way to register as a member of a political party in Ohio is to vote in that party’s primary.  As much appreciation as I have for Dennis Kucinich, I was never able to vote for him in his attempts to win the Democratic nomination for President, because doing so would have made me a registered Democrat, and that’s just not going to happen.  This coming Tuesday, though, I will be voting in the Green Party’s primary and becoming, in the state’s eyes, a registered Green.  This is something that means a lot to me, and I hope that all Ohioans, regardless of political beliefs, will vote in Tuesday’s election and think long and hard about which political party, regardless of size or stature, best expresses the views of the city, state, and country they want to live in.

Even as we take time on Tuesday to remember the horrors of Kent State, I hope that Ohioans will take a moment to celebrate this triumph of our political system, and work to make sure that the state no longer has to suffer from the ineffective duopoly on political power that has brought down this state for so long.  It is of the utmost importance to vote on Tuesday, but Tuesday is still just the start of a very long battle to make our government more representative of the people’s beliefs and desires.