For those who don’t know the story…here is a little about my journey to the Ohio Statehouse. It began at the voting booth in 2022. When I walked in I saw only one choice for my district house rep. It was the first time I ever walked into the voting booth and had no choice at the state level. To me there was something wrong with that. Our system isn’t working if we are finding this commonly happening when we go into the voting booth. It felt as though my representative had been appointed for me. I decided that if during the next cycle there was no challenger then I would make it my civic duty to be that challenger. I reached out to the Libertarian party in the summer of 2023 and expressed my interest in running. It wasn’t until December 16th, 2023 that I received a call from them to meet. At the time I was ill with a winter cold. A week later we met the chairman of the Franklin County Libertarian Party. He provided some initial guidance and some books to read in order to prepare for a run at office. I discovered I had missed the deadline to run within a party and that the Libertarians didn’t have ballot access at that time. So my only option was to run as an Independent candidate. The task was to obtain 345 valid signatures within my district between late December and March 18, 2024 in order to get onto the ballot. The requirement for a valid signature was the voter had to be registered at an address within my district for at least one year. The voter signatures had to be legible because the petitions are all hand-written. There are no digital petitions currently available; although, many voters asked if there was a way for them to be able to sign electronically. The petition form for an independent candidate is pretty confusing and not user friendly. Any little mistake could throw off an entire list of 30 signatures on each page. Being that it was winter time, and I don’t get off of work from my phone center job at home until 4:30pm. In late January, you have about 30-45 minutes before dark so the best option is to jump in the car and drive to the nearest road you can walk down and start knocking on doors. Weather conditions in February – March are also unpredictable. Fortunately, this winter season was pretty mild mostly. However, there were a few days with snow and ice. There was only one day that I did not knock on doors and instead stood in front of the local library to solicit signatures for my ballot access. Getting signatures is not the only hurdle. Before you even do that in Ohio you have to file what is known as form 30D and you have to create a political action campaign business in order to open a business account to take donations for the campaign. That, of course, costs money up front. Then there is the need to have some form of literature to hand out to your potential voters while collecting signatures and it is advantageous to form a website to direct those people to with information to establish yourself. By the time the week before the deadline came I was able to collect a total of 418 signatures. I busted my toenail on a raised sidewalk during the last week so I had to quit collecting signatures and hope the 418 would put me over the threshold. About a month after the deadline I contacted the Franklin County Board of Elections to follow up on the status of my bid for ballot access. I was encouraged to come in within the week for their meeting that would determine whether or not I made the ballot for November 2024. I attended the meeting to discover that of my 418 signatures, 73 of them were knocked off by the board of elections as invalid despite having gone door-to-door within the district every day except one. This put me just 7 signatures shy of the threshold so I didn’t make it onto the ballot as an Independent. After that I thought my bid for 2024 was over. Three months later I received a call from the Libertarian Party chairman I had met with back in December. He explained that the Libertarian Party had managed to gain enough signatures to gain minor party ballot access for 2024. He had been following my campaign to get onto the ballot and asked me if I wanted to go ahead and run as a Libertarian under their banner for 2024. Of course I said yes. My entire goal was to make sure that no matter what this election cycle, Ohio Statehouse District 9 would at least have a choice this time since we did not last time. Being that it was late in the summer I had to go out and gather new signatures. This time I had to get a minimum of 5 signatures and a maximum of 15 signatures from voters who hadn’t voted in a primary in my district for the past 2 years. These voters also had to be registered at their address within the district for at least one year. There was also about a two week time frame that we had to gather those valid signatures in order to meet the new deadline. Petitioning in the winter is much easier than petitioning in the summer simply because 90 degree humid weather is much more difficult for the body than 35 degree weather. I was able to gather my 15 required signatures and did get the approval from the Franklin County Board of Elections for November 5th, 2024 ballot access. No matter what the people of District 9 in November decide, my goal has been to bring awareness of the importance of civic duty. The government our nation’s founders created for us only works if we choose to get involved. If we don’t then we lose our power as a people. That is something I am personally not ready to surrender. I hope the voters of District 9 feel the same way that I do. I am truly enjoying meeting all of the flavors and people in the community of District 9. It has been an amazing adventure and continues to be.