Lost in the talks of Mitt Romney’s “binder full of women” and the second presidential debate is the fact that Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein was arrested outside Hofstra University before the debate took place last night. The story was broke by Hofstra’s own student newspaper: The Long Island Report. In the video posted by the paper, police tell the candidate she is blocking traffic before she is ultimately arrested. While the police aren’t wrong in their assessment, Stein shouldn’t have been on the outside of the building in the first place. Rather she should have been on the stage with her own director’s chair next to President Obama and Governor Romney. Stein will be on 85 percent of the presidential ballots when Americans take to the voting booths in the next few weeks, and many will scratch their heads wondering who she is. Too often during election periods, we see the media blatantly ignore legitimate candidates for office. In the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries, that candidate was Ron Paul. Stein has been given the Ron Paul treatment ever since the Democratic and Republican candidates were decided.

Little-to-no mention is made of her or Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson during presidential debate discussions, and television audiences likely haven’t been exposed to any approved ads from her. Forbes contributor Peter J. Reilly wrote in a recent column that his good friend believes that the United States has been a corporate fascist dictatorship since 1962. Reilly follows this fact in the column’s next sentence by saying he’s never agreed with his friend until after Stein’s arrest. Regardless of her chances at sitting in the oval office, the fact is she and others deserve to be part of the three debates instead of blatantly ignored and uninvited to these national events. Perhaps the people have lost control of the election. Perhaps we’ve lost our debates.