GREENVILLE, South Carolina — City Council has picked the ballot design Greenville, South Carolina, will use once party primaries for city office end. The choice is a summer primary open to every filer, then a November election between the two people who finish first and second.
The requirement comes from a state law passed in May. It tells South Carolina cities with more than 39,000 residents to run municipal races without party primaries starting next year. Greenville and Florence are the two cities that law actually moves. Other cities of that size were already off the party system.
Lawmakers did not hand those two cities a single template. They listed three. One is a plurality vote: whoever has the most ballots wins, even without a majority. Another keeps one general election and adds a runoff afterward if no candidate clears half the vote. The third puts every candidate into one primary in June and sends only the top two on to November.
Greenville took that third route. Council acted Monday, Sept. 28. A Saturday editorial and a Sept. 29 news report both describe the action as a vote for nonpartisan primaries. The editorial calls the tally unanimous. The news report's lead uses that same word, then says the recorded vote was 5-1, with Council member Lillian Brock Flemming opposed and Council member Wil Brasington not voting because he had already started a campaign for mayor. Those details are not the same, and this account does not treat them as settled beyond what each page states.
What both pages do fix is the shape of the race. Party letters come off the city ballot. Candidates meet in June. The two highest totals advance to the November general election. The news report adds mechanics the editorial does not: filing closes March 30; if two or fewer people file for a seat, that June round is skipped; and the June vote, when it happens, falls on the second Tuesday of the month. November city generals stay in odd-numbered years, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday.
Florence is under the same statute and the same three choices. The Saturday editorial says that city's attorney was still reading the law and that council there had not picked a format. The Sept. 29 report does not describe a Florence vote. If a covered city never chooses, the editorial says the fallback is plurality, the option it argues against. The news report lists plurality as one of the three legal designs without spelling out that fallback in the same passage.
Nothing in either page says the November date itself moves. The change is the path to that date, and the absence of a party primary, for city offices in Greenville, South Carolina, beginning with the 2027 cycle the statute names as next year.
