Looking at the voter registration flap

The first ever gubernatorial runoff in South Dakota history is now behind us, with current Gov. Larry Rhoden winning in convincing fashion. Rhoden maintained a lead of roughly 71 percent to 29 percent over Aberdeen businessman Toby Doeden as results came in, and that was the final outcome. That may have come as a bit of a surprise, since it was Doeden who grabbed most of the vote during the initial four-person primary, where Doeden received 31 percent of the primary vote on June 2 and Rhoden received 25 percent. The rest of the votes went to Congressman Dusty Johnson at 23 percent and Speaker of the South Dakota House Jon Hansen at 21 percent. If you do the math, apparently nearly all of the Johnson and Hansen voters supported Rhoden in the runoff.
It’s also no secret that a lot of Democrats and Independents supported Rhoden in the runoff.
Republican voter registration skyrocketed in the time between the initial vote and the runoff, as there was a 7,382-person rise in registered South Dakota Republicans during that six weeks between the primary and the runoff registration deadline. Many of those were Democrats who were open about not wanting Doeden to be governor, and as such, switched parties if only temporarily to more vote against him than to vote for Rhoden.
Those changes weren’t enough to affect the outcome of the runoff election, however, as Rhoden ended up defeating Doeden by nearly 50,000 votes. Rhoden will be the Republican nominee in the fall’s general election against Democratic nominee Dan Ahlers.
While the amount of voters who switched parties may not have been enough to affect the election, it was certainly enough to ruffle some feathers, as many Republicans groused about Democrats voting in what was an extension of the Republican primary.
“I think it’s petty to jump back and forth, meddle in another party’s operations,” Jim Eschenbaum, chair of the South Dakota Republican Party, told KELOLand. “If they can’t put a strong enough platform and principles together for their party to get candidates elected, then they need to work on their party.”
To be clear, the people switching parties prior to the runoff were not doing anything wrong, at least in the literal sense. It is and was perfectly legal to switch your party affiliation at any time, and it’s quite simple to do. You just go to the county auditor, fill out a form, and voila, you’re a Republican. Many Democrats and Independents changed affiliations and immediately voted. Some even switched their party affiliation back immediately after voting.
You can debate whether or not people should be able to ping pong back and forth between political parties, or whether or not at the very least you should only be able to do it a certain amount of times overall or have some sort of waiting period before you can do it again once you’d already done it.
We say those who did it were operating within the rules and found a bit of a loophole. If legislators want to patch that loophole, they can do so beginning in January.