South Dakota friends and neighbors, if you offer to sign a petition and the circulator does this, you know something’s fishy:
(My apologies for the low quality—finger and focus error!)
Carrying a petition (yes, I saw it on the board in his hands), but not willing to let me sign… hmm, that sounds almost like voter disenfranchisement, doesn’t it, Secretary Krebs?
This incident at 6th and Main in Rapid City yesterday afternoon bemused the gentleman in the orange t-shirt. He saw the whole thing, including the part before I got my finger off the lens when the petitioner said he couldn’t talk to reporters. The gentleman in the orange shirt didn’t run; he stayed and talked to me about the shady out-of-state petition circulators he’s seen around Rapid City during his sales trip:
An entire floor of the Rapid City occupied by out-of-state petition circulators. Attorney General Jackley, will you be visiting Rapid City any time soon?
It’s obvious to Mr. Payne as it should be to every South Dakotan: these out of state petitioners don’t want us to know they are here. They don’t want us to know what they are up to. And when people purporting to seek access to the ballot are keeping secrets and running scared from publicity, we should be alarmed.
Fellow South Dakotans, six weeks remain to circulate ballot question petitions. If you see someone circulating a petition, take out your phone, turn on the video camera, and ask the circulator what the petition is about. If the circulator and his or her petition are legit, the circulator will gladly stand and talk to you. If not, then you know someone’s doing something dirty to your democracy.
p.s.: Maybe 20 minutes before shooting the above videos, I approached another petitioner at the same corner. He refused to let me see his petition, walked away, and tried to fight back by taking his own video of me and lobbing any number of wild accusations. I’m a little short on bandwidth at the moment, but I’ll upload that video in another post later for your enjoyment.
Wow! Was this more Marsey’s law ones?
Every politician that has to get signatures should be outraged these people are damaging the petition process with these actions.
Good luck getting Krebs and Jackley to do anything about it if Glodt’s involved.
The same skunks were run off the SD Mines campus Friday morning.
Some are cap the rate at 18%. They have been harassing a South Dakotan regularly until he calls 911 for protection and they often gang up on him in multiples of three.
Last I heard that bunch had younger kids doing the pumpkin fest.
DD-maybe that is the whole point. Make Dakotans disgusted with the process and they may well get rid of it. Remember Ken Starr and the independent investigator law that wingnuts hated? Starr abused every part of the law and then even Dems voted to do away with it.
Law and order, we don’t need no stinkin law and order. Every man for himself in republican land, unless and until the fallout happens to their money train as we are now seeing. This is clearly against the law but not the republican law. Krebs is a poor excuse for an elected official and an even greater excuse as an American. Another republican who hates America.
I suppose there is nothing law enforcement can do since being a jackass political tool is not a crime. It does seem like people who care about SD election and petition laws ought to be interested. Krebs?
Citizens with cameras are probably the most effective means to deal with the usurious sleeze balls. Shame, shame, shame.
FYI – Circulator 2 from the Brookings video (pregnant lady) was at Farmer’s Market in SF this weekend. She said she was carrying 5 petitions.
Which ones?
I’m carrying the redistricting petition and in getting ready to do so research the new and old laws regarding the carrier of petitions. It’s pretty clear to me these guys are violating a number of laws and probably the people paying them to pass the petitions are in violation as well.
My question is when do these laws get enforced? Or when are they broken? At each contact with a voter? When the petition gets notarized? When it gets turned into the state? That’s unclear to me. I advocate for less restrictions on the initiative and referendum process because I believe in direct democracy.
These new restrictions were put in place by forces worried about free wheeling direct democracy. Now they are being violated. When do they get enforced?
Frank, my worry is that AG Jackley may take a very conservative position and say there is no law to enforce until a petition has ben submitted. Until then, that’s just a guy standing on a street corner with a piece of paper, acting strangely.
However, as I emphasize in the video I just published last night and the short essay I posted yesterday morning, we could argue that if someone has a petition and refuses to make it available to an inquiring citizen, that person is committing a form of disenfranchisement, just as if an election worker refused to hand a citizen a ballot.