JAY W. RAGLEY, political director of the S.C. Republican Party, didn’t like our editorial last Sunday blasting the abominable idea of requiring voters to register by party.

He indicated he didn’t appreciate our saying his party, in pushing this idea, wants “to force South Carolinians to sign a loyalty oath to a political party or else give up their right to fully participate in the democratic process.”

In an e-mail, he mentioned the S.C. Democrats’ aborted “plans to require voters to sign a loyalty oath during their 2004 Presidential Preference Primary. Surprisingly, this fact was missing from your editorial.”

Well, it was missing, but I don’t know why that was surprising. We had already ripped that idea up one side and down the other back at the time — even though the Democrats had, by the time we published, backed off on their unconscionable idea.

I still see red when I think about it. The Democratic Party almost denied me and all other independents our right to have a say in who would appear on the November ballot against George W. Bush — unless we lied and signed an oath swearing that we were Democrats.

So I sent Mr. Ragley a copy of what I had said about it at the time. (You’d think I wouldn’t have to, but partisans are quick to feel wronged by criticism, and even quicker to forget your criticisms of their opposition.) A sample:

“It was hard to come up with words — ones you could use in a family newspaper — that fully expressed my fury at learning that I would not be allowed to vote today... I knew that political parties were capable of some pretty outrageous conduct, but this really took the cake: getting everybody in this state all excited about their primary over a period of many months, building to today’s crescendo, only to tell eager voters who show up, ‘Sorry, but unless you’re already a member of the club, you can’t come in.’”

Then there was our editorial that ran the same day (Feb. 3, 2004) as my column. In part, it said: “(W)hile this new problem with party-run primaries has been overcome, at least for this year, we still are left with the larger problem — that our state treats an essential step in the process of choosing the leader of the Free World as a private affair.”

I will never, ever understand how either the Democrats or the Republicans can justify that in their minds. You see, most states already have party registration, and here’s how that plays out: A third of the voters get to choose one of the two viable candidates who will appear on the ballot for president in the fall, and another third gets to pick the other one. The other third — the sensible third that is completely turned off by all the party games (guess which third I identify with) — is shut out of this process, and has to settle in the fall for choosing between two people nominated only by voters on the two extremes.

This is not only a shabby way to treat the people in the middle — the people who in the end actually decide elections — it’s a lousy way to pick a president who can lead all of the country. That’s why we keep failing to do so.

With lesser offices the effect can be even more dramatic, though on a smaller scale. With congressional and state legislative offices, it can bar non-party members from having any say in who their representatives will be. Most districts are drawn as either safe Republican seats or safe Democratic seats. Consequently, the primary is the election. If you don’t get to vote in that, you effectively don’t get to vote.

Mr. Ragley finished his message with these words: “In the spirit of fairness and lively debate, I hope you will strongly consider publishing an editorial from Chairman Dawson on this very subject in the next few days.”

Well, several days passed, and I hadn’t heard from Katon Dawson, so I gave him a call. I know him and his opposite number at the Democratic Party, Joe Erwin, as reasonable men. So I was sort of hoping that since Mr. Erwin had managed to stop his own party’s loyalty oath at the last second, maybe Mr. Dawson was having his own doubts.

Unfortunately, no. “I am for registration by party,” he said. But he didn’t seem all that excited about it. That could be because his party itself is somewhat divided on the subject. The resolution supporting barring the rest of us from their primaries passed at the state convention with 56 percent of the vote — meaning there’s a solid, sensible 44 percent that opposes it. (Did you see that? I actually admitted that some partisans are sensible, too. Don’t ask me to do it again, though.)

Mr. Dawson is leaving it up to those who are passionately for this beast to push for it: “If they’re for it and it has merit, they need to fill up the hearing rooms” at the Legislature.

If they ever succeed at getting our lawmakers to go for this, there’ll be only one thing left for us independents to do:

We’ll all just register as Republicans. And then we’ll get all the Democrats we know to register as Republicans, and get them to talk all the other Democrats into registering as Republicans.

Then, once everybody is a Republican, parties won’t matter (just as they didn’t matter back when all these Republicans’ mamas and daddies were Democrats). Then we can forget all this partisan nonsense, elect candidates according to their abilities rather than their ideological purity, and get on with the business of moving this state forward.

For more on this subject, and to register your comments, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.