We’re delighted that Greenville’s City Council decided Monday to switch from partisan elections to a nonpartisan primary followed by a regular general election. The city didn’t have any choice but to abandon its partisan primaries, but it did have a choice about how to conduct new elections, and it chose the best of three options.

The other city ordered to abandon its partisan municipal elections was Florence, which we hope will make the same choice, and make it quickly.

In May, the S.C. Legislature changed state law to require all cities with more than 39,000 people to hold nonpartisan races starting next year. All but two of them already do.

The reason almost every city and town in South Carolina already holds nonpartisan elections — and the reason the Legislature ordered Greenville and Florence to join them — is that no matter how much political hacks like to insist that everything is partisan, it’s not. In particular, most services municipalities provide — fire and police protection, trash collection — have nothing to do with politics. Forcing candidates to run under a party label — as Greenville and Florence and four smaller towns do — makes doing these essential tasks more difficult than they need to be.

But there are many ways to run a nonpartisan election, and the Legislature gave Florence and Greenville three options. It also said that if either city failed to make a decision, it would default to the hands-down worst option.

Greenville City Council members voted unanimously Monday to adopt nonpartisan primaries as the city’s new election method.

Florence officials tell us their city attorney is still reviewing the new law before the council makes a decision. But let’s be clear: The law, while unexpected, is quite simple, and the decision to be made is not a legal question. It’s a policy question.

If Florence fails to act, it will have to hold a plurality election, one in which whoever gets the most votes wins — whether that person takes 90 percent in an uncontested race or 12 percent in a race with 10 candidates. We’ve been lucky that there hasn’t been such a mayoral result in the state’s biggest plurality city — North Charleston — but City Council members have been elected with as little as 29 percent of the vote. In 2023, five of the 10 council seats were won by candidates who received less than half the votes. It’s the perfect way to end up electing fringe candidates or simply candidates most voters didn’t support. Which is the opposite of what our municipal governments need.

Florence’s other options are either a general election followed by a runoff two weeks later if no one gets a majority of the vote (which is Charleston’s method) or a nonpartisan primary in June, with the top two vote getters facing off in a general election in November, which Greenville chose.

Either option would be better than the plurality vote — which itself is probably still better than partisan elections — but the nonpartisan primary and then general election avoids the need to get voters to come back out and vote two weeks after the November general election — which isn’t the best time to get people to the polls. Instant-runoff voting would solve the problem of getting people to vote twice in two weeks, but that’s not legal in South Carolina. It should be.

The new law exempted the four smaller partisan municipalities because supporters feared that those towns would convince their legislators to hold up the bill in the final days of the legislative session. Adding them in ought to be on legislators’ to-do list come January. And lawmakers should drop the plurality vote as the default; that, in fact, shouldn’t even be an option, for the partisan municipalities or anyone else.