Hello I’m Mark the Voter with a message about the general election coming up November 5. Here in South Dakota we have a whole heap of ballot measure to vote on; we need to study up!
You can look up the Secretary of State’s office to get an explanation of all the voter initiatives, amendments, and referendums. After reading the explanations you might need someone to explain the explanations, and that’s where people like me come in. I don’t claim to know it all, I just have my opinions that I’d like to share with you.
This time around we have seven ballot measures (initiatives, amendments, and referendums). I don’t intend to speak about every one of them, but I’d like to start out with just one.
I don’t like the open primaries idea (Amendment H). It reduces our choices down to two before most of us even know what’s going on. Then we have to endure those same two candidates five more months before the general election; now how is that an improvement?
What if someone who is better comes along after the primary? Then we don’t get the candidate we really wanted in the first place. Is that what they’re afraid of, the people getting to vote for someone that we really like?
Here’s my suggestion to the Amendment H people: Since we have so darned many ballot measures that we always need to be keeping track of, why not hold a primary on ballot measures? Let the voters decide their ‘Top Two’ Issues that they want on the ballot and set the other issues aside to simmer down or heat up for another election.
That should make things a lot more simple for a majority of the voters – and that’s democracy, right? The marijuana people (IM 29) should appreciate this because it makes things less confusing, the government people should like it because they’ll still be able to tax everyone who eats (IM28), the typesetters should be happy because he/she/it/them/they/whosoever won’t have to change all the wording on all the documents (Amendment E), and finally the voters will get to decide (Amendment H); oh well, I already talked about Amendment H.
There are a bunch of ballot measures we South Dakotans have to work on this year. We best look ‘em over very carefully because this is probably the last time in a long time we’ll have to fix the problems that they are about to create.
You’re welcome!
Mark the Voter
