On the 2018 ballot measures, South Dakotans showed a high aversion to change. South Dakotans rejected the two measures that could have made a substantive positive difference in anyone’s life, turning down both Amendment W and Initiated Measure 25 45% to 55%. The defeat of Amendment W, the constitutional refit of 2016’s Initiated Measure 22, along with the fact that voters ousted only three Republicans who voted last year to repeal IM 22, demonstrates that IM 22 is dead as a campaign issue. The defeat of IM 25, the tobacco tax for vo-techs, denies us the opportunity to test G. Mark Mickelson’s hypocrisy by seeing if Republicans would have sued to block IM 25 for trying to appropriate money by initiative instead of by the Legislature.
Thankfully, voters also protected their ability to fix their own constitution, rejecting Amendment X 46% to 54%. We thus can still amend our state constitution by a simple majority vote, rather than by the 55% margin that Senator Jim Bolin falsely claimed was necessary to protect the constitution from too many amendments.
The success of Amendment Z, the single-subject rule on amendments, does make it a little harder to fix problems in the constitution. Passed 62% to 38%, Z may not have much practical effect: initiators know that trying to propose complicated amendments is the kiss of death for collecting signatures and winning votes. All that happens now is that lawyers get one more foothold for court challenges to initiative petitions that they want to quash.
Initiated Measure 24 likely won’t live to make a difference. The unconstitutional ban on out-of-state contributions to ballot question campaigns will fall the moment Big Pharma or Big Tobacco wants to fight another grassroots initiative in South Dakota. They’ll either take South Dakota to court to repeal IM 24 in toto (and Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg will lose that case), or they’ll just use the loopholes in IM 24 to launder their money into paper corporations in South Dakota (and Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg will be too busy trumping up charges against Democrats to investigate those violations).
Net result: South Dakotans voted for one amendment that makes democracy a little harder and one initiative that affirms South Dakota’s quizzical bunker mentality (we’re a tourist state that hates out-of-state dollars?) but won’t survive court scrutiny.
I voted against X, but with some trepidation: it would make good amendments harder to pass, true, but it would also make bad amendments harder to pass. And I don’t trust my neighbors or their legislators to be proposing more good amendments than bad ones.
IM 24 may not be constitutional, but it should be. I’ve never lived and never will live in California, or Texas, or Wisconsin; there’s no reason I should have been allowed to donate for or against Prop 8, to Beto or Cruz, or for or against recalling Scott Walker.
These heinous IM things went down exactly as grudznick expected and advocated.
You’re a fine predictor of SD voters, Mr. grudznick. I notice that voters approved Medicaid expansion initiatives in Idaho, Utah and Nebraska (all conservative states). Do you think SD voters would override the legislature and approve a Medicaid expansion, if Mr. H could get a petition passed?
smh
It is good to see that people understand that IM 24 is unconstitutional.
Some of us do, Matt. In this isolated case, I look forward to the Koch Brothers, Big Pharma, or some other such vile corporate interest suing the State of South Dakota, overturning IM 24, and, as a bonus, making Jason Ravnsborg look like a mumbling idiot in court.
The ugly thing is, those big-money interests could easily enlist the support of the ACLU on this issue.