Voter Information Guide

This afternoon I check our mail and I see we've received a Voter Information Guide for Democrats and a Voter Information Guide for Independents, cool must have been put out by the SD Registrar of Voters for next weeks primaries. I wonder what the Republican and other party ones would look like? My curiosity begins to assuage quickly though and suspicion takes it's place as I start to take a closer look. At first glance they appear different, different patriotic graphics and wording on the front, but when you flip them over they are eerily similar...

Here's the front:

Here's the back:
Uh? They look almost exactly the same, and when we start to examine the content we can see a few oddities here. All of the proposition recommendations are the same: 91 - NO, 92 - YES, 93 - YES, 94-97 YES. Then we come to the presidential recommendation here:

They're hard to read since I took them with my phone's camera but the text is:

"For President. Vote for the Democrat of your choice in the Primary Election and then rally around the winner in November."

and

"For President. The Democratic Party invites Independent voters to help pick the Democratic canidate for President. Ask for a Democratic ballot when you vote."

Strange, why would a seemingly neutral agency such as the Voter Information Guide (as it says under the paid postage) take a Democratic slant, urging Independent (aka undecided) voters to vote for their candidates and props? So what's going on here? After a quick Google search I found the answer, mostly through another site who's noticed the same thing. These flyers are a sham, designed to look like official voter information endorsed by specific parties when in fact they are targeted to independent undecided voters to lean Democrat. Even though I'm a progressive, things like this really jade me about our political system. Elections should not be influenced by those who can afford to pay for these tricks. Digging further it appears these are created by a Political Consulting Company called Levine & Associates who are hired by various political action groups and candidates. While it's not clear who exactly funded these specific flyers, from looking at their client list it could be any number of groups endorsing propositions on the slate for next Tuesday.

This is one of the big things that gets me about politics, you hear it all the time, but when you actually see how shady it can get it really makes you wonder why we allow such nonsense. If you get one of these just toss it and pay it no attention, or better yet, put a Return to Sender on the front and drop it back in the mailbox and charge them twice for postage.