I don’t like losing… but I also don’t like wasting time and money on a clearly losing battle.
I have ended the People Power Petition Drive. Weekend before last, I surveyed my circulators to find out how many initiative petition signatures they had in hand. I had just over 6,000 in my file box; the tally from circulators who responded was not quite another thousand.
That left less than four weeks to collect another 18,000 signatures to bring us to the 25,000 target that would give us sufficient cushion above the statutory 16,961-signature requirement to make the 2020 ballot. With a snowstorm already coming last week to wipe out a few good sidewalk canvassing days, I figured we had 21 effective signature collection days, meaning we needed 857 signatures per day. My survey of our almost entirely volunteer circulator corps showed no sign that we could accelerate to that pace from our eight-month average of 30 signatures per day.
The petition drive was hamstrung by the very Republican bureaucracy and paperwork that the People Power Petition sought to overturn. Numerous South Dakotans expressed support for the cause but declined to participate when they heard how all of the absurd paperwork, invasion of privacy, and legal jeopardy participating in an initiative or referendum petition drive now entails due to the Legislature’s war on democracy.
Circulating was also hampered by the tight labor market. Our petition strategy depended on being able to complement volunteer circulators with a few paid circulators who could be required to produce a predictable quota of signatures. I encountered the same workforce shortage that other South Dakota employers have noted for years: pretty much everyone with employable skills seems to be employed. $15 an hour was not enough to draw out the small corps of reliable, paid, full-time circulators I was looking for, and I didn’t have the budget to raise wages.
Even if paid circulators had been available, managing them requires another level of staff at multiple sites—at least in Sioux Falls and Rapid City—to hold paid circulators accountable daily, count signatures, check residency, and issue payment. Such accountability staff requires much higher salaries, offices, and other overhead.
Very simply, by sabotaging the petition process with unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy, the Republican Legislature has strangled grassroots activism and ensured that the only petitions that make the ballot will be those backed by huge budgets.
To all who backed this petition drive with shoe leather and/or cash, I offer my thanks for your efforts and my deepest regrets for not being able to snowball your enthusiasm into a bigger deployable bankroll and circulator corps. We must now seek other routes to restore our constitutional rights in South Dakota.
This is tragic. I expect the power elite in South Dakota are patting themselves on the back, as they cash the checks from the out-of-state elites who pay them off. Their wet dream has been to get rid of the interference of the common folk, so their corruption will go unimpeded, so that nuclear waste, and solid waste and foreign-controlled uranium companies can have their way. They couldn’t do it by direct attack on the I & R. They had to do it by unconstitutional statutes. I assume your lawsuit goes forward, though, and there is a chance that this will be addressed there.
I have no desire to return to South Dakota, but if I did, I would want to help organize a grassroots citizens’ effort that would take this and other issues on. Much as I respect your efforts, Cory, you can’t do it by yourself. There has to be a core group of people from across that state who bring forward a broad-based multi-year effort that addresses the government corruption issue in South Dakota. It has to be non-partisan.
I harken back to the 80s and 90s a lot. We built good non-partisan coalition effort that worked all angles: contested case hearings, legislative lobbying, grassroots organizing, rulemaking hearings, petitioning at local levels, developing sources within the agencies, FOIA and open records requests, and a constant effort in the media. We knew we might lose 95 percent of the time in the state boards and the Legislature. But by fighting on every platform, even in losing, you expose the corruption throughout the government.
The problem, as you point out, is that people live very busy and complicated lives. We noticed the difference as volunteers in our efforts had to reduce their participation in order to make money. I had to face that issue myself in the mid-1990s, so you have to be continually bringing in new people, and provide them leadership opportunities. I think we failed at that toward the latter 1990s, and that gave the power elite just the opportunity they needed to start messing with the initiative and referendum.
SD Republican legislators think they’ve won by strangling the initiative/referendum process. These self-consumed, smug men wanted to make it impossible for working people to speak up to their oppression. If Cory can’t beat those dominating statutes, nobody can. However, nothing’s been won but pain. What they’ve done is force their kids to raise their grandchildren far away from Grandma.
I was embarassed to bring my young daughter to SD. When we did rarely come, she got the putrid smell of facism quickly … and remembers it well, to this day.
Yes, Donald, the lawsuit continues. I will continue to seek to restore democracy by any legal means possible.
You are right, Donald. Protecting initiative and referendum requires far more than just me. It requires a group of a thousand committed activists who, once they have identified and agreed on issues that require popular action, can each pick up petitions from an organizing committee and collect 25 or 50 signatures in one weekend.
Porter, I’m not the benchmark for beating them. If I can’t beat those statutes, then we need 55 people like me: 36 in the House, 18 in the Senate, and one in the Governor’s chair.
Yes; you are the benchmark, Cory. If not you, then who? Melissa Mentele? She’s a legitimate and valid representative of proper values in SD and seems to be able to get through the I/R barbed wire. There won’t be 36-18 and one. There won’t be a grass roots campaign, either. The grass is clipped so low, the liberal roots have died. One leader is the best you can hope for. One leader that can appeal to the repressed sense of equality buried deep within the Republican legislators dark hearts.
… or a judge with a diverse personality.
I don’t think you need 18/36/1. It would help if there was some balance, but we were able to beat Janklow, the very Republican legislature and a huge corporation over nuclear waste. That was also at a time when they said grassroots organizing was dead, but it wasn’t.
Perhaps, the reason your grass roots was successful was because you were told it was dead? Doctors routinely tell patients (especially athletes, “You’ll never be able to do that again.” in order to spur the mental resolve necessary to “do that again”).
Mr. Pay, this was not just about nuclear waste, and The Borehole.
I’m sorry this didn’t work out Cory, but I respect your diligent and dedicated efforts and those of everyone else who participated.
I’m sorry for the people of SD on a regular basis. They deserve so much better than the Koch/NRA/SDGOP, but most of them aren’t aware that they do.
Pay has demonstrated in nearly every post his deep concern and experience gained from his moral activism, and leading the charge here against DOE ‘s borehole scheme is a prime example. Not one of the comments posted here has ever shown insight from grdz. A typical uneducated bigoted narrow minded SD redneck, hiding behind a fictional avatar
Yet, I have been named “the most loved Conservative with Common Sense on this blog” for 5 consecutive years and I have the plaques to prove it.
This is truly tragic. I really think the People Power Petition is a particularly great idea. It’s too bad, nowadays, ‘people power’ sounds perhaps too ‘unacceptability leftist’ to most rural state residents.
If only someone could stand up and present an accurate diagnosis as to, “why South Dakota is so consistently and inflexibly conservative” only then could we ever have a chance in competing with them or treating their disease.
I really think all the solutions to the political problem are rooted in the above question, “why?” Unfortunately, the answer to the question is just simply NOT PRETTY – and how long it takes for you/us local folks to accept it will have little or no bearing on how long it takes the rest of the country – because most of you are not willing to help teach outsiders the truth about what lays before your eyes every day – even though they need help understanding it..
Face it, we’ve got widespread mental illness problems in South Dakota as well as this through out our whole 5 state region. We have these problems more than the whole rest of the country for a many reasons and it is the subject of very deep and substantial conversation about Progress in America.
I know; I know – none of you believe-in being divisive or negative – because positivity always works (even when it’s delusional). You can save your breaths on that.
“Why South Dakota is so consistently and inflexibly conservative?” Adam, I’ve been researching that question since I began following Cory’s blog during Obama’s first candidacy. I have some ideas as to why. But, it’s probably better to just accept it like it is. SD is a museum of culture and ideas. America needs a few of these places because if there were none, they’d be missed. People in SD do have a choice to move away, so good wishes to them if they stay.
grudznick steers the boat.
Mr. Lansing gives up his goat.
Adam, I agree with you about the widespread mental illness and I’ve talked about it here on DFP. It’s why I left, why I still care about SD and why I see the loss of so much potential disused, denied and squashed.
All I have to do is use grudznick’s church for bait and he slithers out of his whiskey bottle, every time. Goat Goat Goat – three at a time on grudz’s dime