by Dawn Yurkas

March 6 is Super Tuesday. Virginia Republicans will go to our voting precincts to cast our vote to nominate a Republican candidate for our party for president.

If ever there is a time when conservative voters of Virginia feel betrayed by the Virginia Republican Party, it is now. Last time I looked I lived in Virginia, the land of Washington, Jefferson and Madison. Virginia is the home of the 700 Club and CBN, the home of Liberty University, a land of blue-collar workers who toil in the coal mines, of farmers who grow our cotton, tobacco and peanuts. Virginia is a place where churches outnumber businesses in the yellow pages of most small cities. Virginia is not only the Beltway suburbs of Washington, D.C., as much as this may disappoint state party officials, and it is not the avant garde of “The Beach” either.

Our choices on the Republican primary ballot are a neoconservative former Massachusetts governor and a Libertarian congressman. Yes, we have all heard why other candidates are not on the ballot. We read the papers, listened to the news broadcasts and listened carefully. The day after the state Supreme Court tossed out the other candidates’ challenges to be on the ballot, we watched our governor come out and support the former Massachusetts governor for president.

Is it just me, or is there in Virginia a move to push a certain candidate upon us? The Virginia Republican Primary ballot doesn’t even allow us to write in an alternate. No write-in. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. How many of us, due to lack of choice or the inability to write in a candidate, are going to stay home this primary? An option to protest our inability as voters to write in a candidate would be to stay home and wait for the general election. The polling data already shows us that when the former Massachusetts governor is the only choice on the ballot, voter turnout decreases.

This will certainly be the case in Virginia on Super Tuesday. However, there is a solution for us disenchanted conservatives in Virginia to make a statement to our state Republican Party and to our governor, who, it seems, is saddling up to a pseudo-winner, maybe in hopes for a ride on the national ticket.

Virginia conservatives, it is time to make a formal protest with your soon-to-be-silenced voice and vote. Make it loud and clear that Virginia conservatives are not ready to settle for the candidates put forward on the Virginia Republican Primary ballot, with no choice and no write-in option.

We shouldn’t be blindly handing over our delegates to a candidate by default. The Republican Party of Virginia has denied me my voice to choose with even a write-in. If I want to write in Mickey Mouse on a ballot, I should be able to write in Mickey Mouse.

However, we have been handed a clear mandate by our state Republican Party officials with a “you will vote for whom we want to win, and you will be happy for it.”

I will not waste my primary vote to support a candidate based upon “electability.” I will urge every single one of my evangelical, conservative, military family, business-owner friends I have to join with me and lodge a protest vote in the Republican Primary in Virginia on Tuesday, March 6. Cast your vote for Ron Paul. Do not, conservatives, let your state and national party leaders tell you who to vote for and when to vote them.

Last time I looked I lived in the United States of America, in the state of Virginia, not the USSR. When this national election is over, I urge you to change your party affiliation from Republican to independent, so that the Virginia Republican Party will no longer again take your vote for granted.