South Dakota voters will be voting on Proposition V in November. It would convert all elections in South Dakota, except presidential elections, to non-partisan elections. According to this story, opponents of V have charged that OpenPrimaries.org broke South Dakota campaign law by raising money for the “yes” side. OpenPrimaries is headquartered in New York.
I have no problem making State and local elections non partisan .Maybe I don’t know will take out the big money in politics .It could help out independents and third party’s .
William the problem is you still have under representation. It’s impossible to implement proportional representation under a non-partisan system; and as such first-past-the-post, instant run-off, and even approval voting will lead to a situation where only portions of the electorate have representation in their individual districts.
Using first past the post, if only 40% of people vote for the candidate that wins, 60% of the people in that district don’t actually have representation that actually represents them (with or without a partisan system). Same goes for instant run-off, at least 50% – 1 vote won’t have the representation they want.
With approval voting, while that system should be better in all actuality it never is. Most people bullet vote (so it’s no different than first-past-the-post in that circumstance), and if they don’t you still end up with a system where 10%, 20%, sometime upwards of 35% of people don’t have a representative that actually represents what they believe.
Proportional representation will ALWAYS create a legislature that has representation for a minimum of 98% of the electorate of the entire state. And the only reason it’s not 100% is because most proportional systems have a threshold that a party must hit before getting seats.