Sorry, folks! No referendum.
I sought to suspend and refer to the 2020 ballot House Bill 1094, the odious, volunteer-killing, and likely unconstitutional requirement that citizens request state permission, submit their phone and address to a state registry, and wait for and wear a state-issued badge to circulate ballot question petitions. In the 90 days allowed by law for circulating a referendum petition, I needed to collect 16,961 signatures.
I got a few thousand. Very few thousand.
One could argue that the political market has spoken: if voters aren’t sufficiently vexed to sign a petition, they aren’t sufficiently vexed to overturn the will of the Legislature.
I do not yet accept that argument.
On the contrary, I contend that we have seen the first test of the Legislature’s newest efforts to stifle referendum by imposing bureaucracy and paperwork that prevent vexed voters from ever seeing a petition. This spring, those efforts appear to have passed their first test.
To put referendum petitions in front of voters and submit them to the state, here’s the process we could follow just four years ago:
- Volunteer expresses interest in circulating.
- I hand/e-mail a petition to that circulator.
- That circulator runs copies of the petition and collects all the signatures she can.
- That circulator signs and notarized her petitions and sends them back to me.
- I pile all those notarized petitions in a box, carry them to the Secretary of State’s office, and sign one affidavit.
Under the new rules piled onto the process since the repeal of IM 22 by the Mickelson Legislature, the process explodes with steps and complications:
- Volunteer expresses interest in circulating.
- Volunteer must give me her phone number and e-mail address.
- I must send a form with the circulator’s name, phone number, and e-mail address to the Secretary of State for approval.
- I call/email the circulator back after the SOS has approved her form and tell her she can start circulating.
- I hand/e-mail a petition and a Secretary-of-State-approved circulator handout with that circulator’s name, phone number, and e-mail to that circulator.
- That circulator runs copies of the petition and the personally identifying circulator handout and collects all the signatures she can.
- The circulator hands one of those personally identifying handouts to every person who signs. If she runs out of handouts, she has to wait to collect any more signatures until she can print off more handouts.
- That circulator signs and notarized her petitions and sends them back to me.
- That circulator also fills out a circulator affidavit, giving current address, past two addresses, and drivers license info; attaches some other unspecified document attesting to current residence; and promises under oath and penalty of perjury to stay in South Dakota after the petition submission deadline and sends me those documents.
- I pile all those notarized petitions and residency affidavits in a box, carry them to the Secretary of State’s office, sign one affidavit, then sign and get notarized again every circulator’s residency affidavit.
Good volunteers are hard to find. When people do volunteer, a good organizer finds a way to capitalize on that volunteer enthusiasm immediately, on the spot, with an opportunity to make a difference without delay. The delay of Steps 2, 3, and 4 kill lots of volunteer enthusiasm: sure, you can help make a difference! But first, sit around and wait for a business day or maybe for an entire weekend while we wait for the Secretary of State to say you can make a difference.
The requirements of current law depress volunteer participation on petition drives. The registry and badges of HB 1094 will depress volunteer participation even more.
As we can see, the Legislature is effectively regulating citizen ballot measures out of existence by making petition drives a bureaucratic nightmare.
We persist nonetheless. My circulators and I will continue to collect signatures on the People Power Initiative Petition, which seeks to repeal those circulator handouts and residency affidavits and many other delays imposed by the Legislature to keep you from petitioning and ultimately from getting to vote on issues. We will continue to recruit new circulators who are willing to put up with all this bureaucracy and paperwork, just this once, to place our initiative. We will work until the initiative deadline, November 4, to put the Legislature’s crazy petition regulations on the ballot and give you all a chance to repeal them.
We didn’t get 16,961 referendum signatures in 90 days. We have another 120 days to get 16,961 initiative signatures. It will not be easy, but we will not give up… because while the Legislature doesn’t trust you to vote on issues, we do. Come sign a petition, come circulate, and give yourself and all of your neighbors a chance to vote on your basic right to petition.
We never lose. We win or we learn something.
Damn. 🙁😖
Please listen to me. Please meet with me. I have a way to obviate the obstruction. I will try my best to meet with and run the idea by Jay, first ,but time is short, Cory. I am having flashbacks of the 2015/16 initiative effort of NASD. We have to get started right away for this to work.
Thank you for your hard work, Cory. It was refreshing to have two of the circulators at our state convention. I’m pretty sure just about everyone in attendance signed both. I know I did!
Uhh… Let me rephrase that. When I said “both”, I meant both the referendum and initiative petitions (not the petitions of both circulators, haha). English… Great language. I hope to learn it someday.
Welcome to a state full of republican sheeple.
Gideon, thank you for singing and for bringing close attention to language to a party leadership post!
John, as you can tell, sometimes I listen best asynchronously. I do take proposals by e-mail.
Cory – can you help me fund a trip to Aberdeen? One day, rental car, gas. Had a conversation with Jay today .. I’m fired up and loaded for bear on this issue. The answer seems so simple to me .. digital/phone communication not an option at this stage. You should also have someone with a little bit of money present. I’ll put in an 18 hour day if you can line up the $. Bob and Jay are welcome to drive out with me. In fact, that would be amazing. The clock is ticking on this!!!
Take, for example, a South Dakotan who likes to mock and ridicule our governor, GOP legislators and MOCs on social media. What would prevent the Sec of State from denying such a citizen a position as a petition circulator? I mean, No Show had a hissy fit over a pic on social media, right? Clearly, abuse of power means nothing to the GOP. This, as well as their “intellectual diversity” bulls**t, is nothing more than Republicans continuing to prove the only ones they consider “real Americans” are those who are exactly like them. Can we please just release the migrants and cage the GOP instead?
grudznick has your back on this one, Mr. Dale. And my good friend, Bob, does have a car and can still drive. I’ll buy 2/3 of the gas. Bob can get you guys free hot dogs as part of his corporate narc job. You make sure to announce you are funded, in-part, by grudznick.
Last evening when this news broke grudznick was over on the Pat Powers blog celebrating with the anti- democracy haters and the VNOE’s.
Something is really wrong in South Dakota. Of course, the Legislature has been a corrupt cesspool for decades, but I’m more concerned with the lack of citizen organizing that is occurring. No one seems to be doing basic organizing to protect their rights, or to do much of anything.
I checked. No one showed up in Pierre to testify against HB 1094. How did that happen? I can only assume that few people, if any, contacted their legislators on this. If you don’t show up, if you don’t make a lot of noise and if you don’t organize effectively, you can be sure your rights are going to be gone.
If HB 1094 had been in any of the sessions in the 1980s and 90s there would have been a hefty citizen presence in Pierre to testify against the bill. There would have been many questions fired at legislators at crackerbarrels. There would have been press releases and press conferences in several media outlets to get the word out. There would have been many letters to the editor submitted. Somehow people in South Dakota aren’t organizing in a way that generates much citizen interest on anything. If you wait until the laws pass to start organizing a referendum, you are way too late, even without their nonsensical new requirements.
One or two people doing it every two years just won’t cut it. People used paid circulation as a crutch to get around having to do grassroots organizing and coalition building. That has to change or you’re doomed. It has to be a statewide grassroots effort that is ongoing and never stops.
Mr. C, you know grudznick invented the #VNOE mantra. And yes, there was some fellow going by my name over on Mr. PP’s blog going on about this stuff. None of that means I won’t fund Mr. Dale’s wonderful roadtrip, if he announces it was funded by grudznick.
#VNOE
One of the best campaigns ever.
grudznick points out that Pat Power’s blog has some serious security issues. He can’t stop nefarious people from posting using other’s names. Even my new nickname “MoonDog” is being culturally appropriated. I for one, have quit posting on that blog. Who knows what viruses your computer or phone could pick up?
SDBlue, I share your concern about the possibility that the Secretary of State could deny or at least stall circulators’ applications.
On the good side, Section 6 of HB 1094 does state that the SOS “shall issue” the badge and ID # “Following receipt of any application… and a registration fee” from a circulator. It is unclear whether the SOS can reject any application and if so, by what criteria.
The badge provides ample opportunity for stalling circulators. HB 1094 provides no timeline for issuing badges. A monkey-wrenching SOS could easily say, “Hey, look, we produce badges once a month, for efficiency reasons. Cranking up the badge press every day just to print one or two badges costs too much; we have to run them as a batch.” They could tangle the printing in paperwork: the SOS and its vendor could require orders on paper and shipment by mail. So imagine: SOS sends letter to printer (downtown Pierre? Pheasantland Industries?). Letter takes two days to reach the printer. Printer takes two days to get around to running the order, takes another day to stick them in a box, ships them cheap back to the Capitol. Badges thus spend a couple more days in transit. SOS opens the box, checks the badges for accuracy, then sorts and sends to individual circulators by normal post… Without any exaggeration, I can easily imagine a workflow that leads to almost two weeks passing between the time a petition sponsor submits a circulator application and the time a circulator receives the badge.
“Vote No on Eveything” show rank disrespect for the intellect and autonomy of the voters.
Messaging messaging messaging. Can SDDP take up the gauntlet?