By Denise Ross

State Sen. Jason Gant, R-Sioux Falls, made a swing out to the Black Hills recently in his bid to become South Dakota’s next Secretary of State. (He attended a Pennington County GOP picnic that was held during the worst picnic weather short of a blizzard, so he’s serious about this.) See his campaign brochure on the jump.

Gant was an open government champion before it was cool - he even has been accused of being a closet Democrat - and he’s got a plan for how to make the Secretary of State’s Office even more open. I’d argue that it already is one of South Dakota’s most open government offices, with the Legislative Research Council probably leading the way. But in our beloved state, the bar for open government hasn’t been set very high.

Gant envisions an SOS office that takes full advantage of the world wide web for both openness and efficiency.

Hopefully we will put as many records as possible right there, get that stuff online, he said. We have to remember who our boss is and who’s paying for it.

Gant would put all the public records maintained by the SOS online - from corporate filings to campaign finance reports - on the website in searchable form, not the pdfs we now have access to. In addition, he would set up a system under which those forms could be filled out entirely online, thus saving the staff the trouble of re-typing the information into another computer. (Right now we can do some of this online, but ultimately the forms get printed out and mailed in - and then re-typed.)

Gant also hopes to visit high school government classes where he would encourage the 18-year-olds to register to vote.

And he said he’d do more to assist small jursidictions with elections while promoting best practices when it comes to those local elections. Like most states, South Dakota doesn’t have an entirely uniform set of elections practices, but Gant thinks maybe we should think about doing that.

For the GOP nomination, Gant faces Teresa Bray who currently works in the SOS office and who Gant expects will have the support of current SOS Chris Nelson. But he’s not worried about that. At the moment, he’s traveling the state meeting with Republican delegates. As in old machine-style politics, in these statewide offices below the governor, it is delegates that win one a primary victory.

To read Gant’s campaign brochure, click “CLICK HERE” below.  

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