South Dakota Legislative Candidate Survey

This email went out tonight from the South Dakota NonPartisan Poll. It is regarding a poll which was sent out this weekend to all South Dakota legislative candidates, Democrat and Republican.

The email contains a link to that survey, which covers a variety of topics that every South Dakota voter should be interested in. Things like where the candidates stand on a proposed expansion of Medicaid, tax increases, Second Amendment protections, the death penalty, abortion, education, illegal immigration, leadership positions in the South Dakota Legislature, and more.

I’m hearing that some of the usual RINO suspects don’t like the survey, and don’t want to respond to it. Maybe they will, if YOU, the voters, let them know you want to know how they stand on these issues. You can find out who the candidates in your area are here.

Don’t you think the voters of South Dakota have a right to know how their candidates would vote on issues like this?

South Dakotans would like to know where the candidates stand on the issues and if they will be responsive to them once elected. We have sent inquiries to all of the candidates that are accessible online and invited them to take our 20 questions survey and advised them this was also an exercise to see who responds to constituents and how fast.
Want to know where SD legislative candidates stand on major issues? So do we!

After many hours researching candidate’s personal email addresses, we sent a personal email containing a personal link for this poll https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SDNonPartisanPoll to each candidate we could find addresses for at 8AM Sunday, October 9th (we could not find a personal email address for Jay Shultz, Leroy Kindler, Everette McKinley, Susan Kelts, Red Dawn Foster, Charles Haan, or John Graham*) in order to collect their responses to major issues of concern to South Dakotans and as a gauge to see how timely and who responds to constituent inquiries.

South Dakotans across the state complain that candidates (especially incumbents) are unresponsive or wont give them a straight answer on important issues of concern to them. We would like to give South Dakotans the chance to see where the candidates publicly stand on the issues before the election.

We would like to share the collected data with every newspaper, TV station, radio station, blog, and voter, to encourage attention to where candidates stand on the issues and to remind our elected officials they are supposed to answer to the voters.

What can you do to help? Please simply respond back in the subject line that you are interested in the data and allow us to update the candidates later this week with a long list of organizations that are interested in their answers.

Several candidates have already trotted out straw man arguments that they “…don’t answer polls I don’t know the person polling… survey limits responses to two binary answers… can’t be answered with a simple yes or no…” The reality is we can pay a company in NY to pay a college kid named “Steve” to do this very same poll and it has no impact on the legitimacy of the questions. Do they fully identify constituents who may write them by email? And, the basic premise of these questions remain unchanged in the realities of legislative votes which end up yes or no on a final vote.

Please join us in asking our legislative candidates to answer the questions South Dakotans have of them.

Best regards,
SD NonPartisan Poll

*An email was sent to the SD Democratic Party asking for the contact information for some of their candidates who did not have a readily available email account AND messages have been sent to Foster, Kelts, Kindler, and Haan on Facebook.

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Bob Ellis has been the owner of media company Dakota Voice, LLC since 2005. He is a 10-year U.S. Air Force veteran, a political reporter and commentator for the past decade, and has been involved in numerous election and public policy campaigns for over 20 years. He was a founding member and board member of the Tea Party groups Citizens for Liberty and the South Dakota Tea Party Alliance. He lives in Rapid City, South Dakota with his wife and two children.

Bob Ellis

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