Initiative Sponsors! Check Rules on Affidavits, Update Your Forms!

Last updated on 2019-02-10

I sent my petition sample, circulator form, and sponsor’s affidavit to the Secretary of State yesterday to move my meta-initiative petition toward circulation:

If you’re working on a ballot measure (and you know you are, Don Haggar and the Koch Brothers, Roger Tellinghuisen and the Deadwood gamblers, John Dale and dope smokers, Levi Breyfogle and anarchists), you’ll want to take a close look at my sponsor affidavit, required by SDCL 2-1-1.2 and formalized by ARSD 05:02:08:07.02:

See that line for “Title of Ballot Measure”? That’s the line where I have to put the title Attorney General Marty Jackley gave to my proposed initiative. (Funny we don’t get to pick our own titles: imagine if we let the Attorney General assign titles to legislators’ bills….)

As I prepared my affidavit, I noticed that the template provided by the Secretary of State’s office on its ballot question website is missing that line:

I know how particular we can get about using exactly the right forms for petitions. In 2016, the City of Sioux Falls and Circuit Court Judge Mark Salter rejected a municipal referendum petition filed by Bruce Danielson because the petition form he said he downloaded from the Secretary of State’s website had the statewide petition circulator’s oath instead of the municipal circulator’s oath. When you do a petition, you have to assume that the language on every document must be perfect.

Technically SDCL 2-1-1.2 does not require the title of the initiative on the sponsor initiative; that statute only specifies that the notarized affidavit accompanying the initial submission of the petition form for SOS approval include the name, address, and signature of each petition sponsor. SDCL 2-1-1.2 requires the AG’s title on the petition itself. So had I used the affidavit form currently on the SOS website, I would have been in technical compliance with those requirements.

And that’s actually all I would have had to do in 2017, if I had been using the form approved by the Board of Elections in 2016. But the State Board of Elections voted at Secretary Shantel Krebs’s request on October 30, 2017, to add the initiative title to the affidavit.

Once again, sponsors, read the law, read the rules.

p.s.: By the way, here are closer views of my proposed circulator form, front and back… which sheet you also might find useful if you’re coming to Pierre Monday to testify for Senate Bill 157!

If you have time to download a 24MB PDF file, you can also check out the petition form I’ve laid out: one 11×17 sheet of paper, printed front and back, then folded (hamburger, not hot dog!) to present to signers like a four-page pamphlet, with the title and AG’s explanation on the front, initiative text the front and inside, five signature lines on page 3 and ten more on the back page, and the all-important circulator’s oath on the back. My fonts:

• AG text: 9-point Arial
• Initiative text: 9-point Arvo.
• Signature boxes: 6-point Times New Roman, copied exactly from SOS.