SD Democrats Offer Delegate Selection Plan for Public Review

While South Dakota Republicans follow their party’s national playbook and work really hard to deny you the chance to vote, South Dakota Democrats are publishing their draft plan for selecting national convention delegates and inviting public comment. Their online post encourages “all interested Democrats” to review and comment on the plan by May 25, but the document (49 pages of plan, 14 pages of attachments) and comment submission form are open to anyone.

South Dakota gets to send 19 delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, set for August 19–22 in Chicago. Five of those delegates are automatic delegates chosen from among party leaders and elected officials. Five at-large national convention delegates are chosen by Democratic delegates to the South Dakota Democratic Convention on June 15 in Pierre. The remaining nine national convention delegates are chosen at the June 4 primary. Each Democratic Presidential candidate who gets at least 15% of the primary vote will get a slice of that nine proportionate to the candidate’s primary vote.

The draft plan underscores the South Dakota Democratic Party’s commitment to allowing independent voters to have a say in that vote:

Starting in 2010, the South Dakota Democratic Party has included registered Independents and NPA (No Party Affiliation) in the South Dakota Democratic Primary. While we traditionally do not have a great number of Democratic primaries for statewide office, this change evidences the value of inclusiveness with Independent voters, the fastest growing group of registered voters in South Dakota. While some Democratic activists have suggested that this has diminished the incentive to register as a Democrat, we have resisted those challenging this decision, and seeking to disenfranchise this group of voters in the selection of Democratic candidates on the primary ballot [South Dakota Democratic Party, draft Delegate Selection Plan, retrieved 2023.04.23, p. 7].

In other efforts at inclusiveness, the delegate selection plan requires near-equal representation of men and women among delegates (“non-binary gender delegates…shall not be counted in either the male or the female category”, so the Dems can select any number of non-binary delegates, as long as the number of men and women among the remainder differs by no more than one). The draft selection plan sets “goals”—not mandatory quotas—for representation of minorities baed on their percentage of the Democratic electorate:

Making sure the party recruits the right mix of delegates to meet those goals falls to an Affirmative Action Committee on which a majority of members are West River American Indians:

Posting this draft plan and inviting public comment is part of the education and outreach campaign the SDDP proposes to conduct throughout the rest of this year and up to the June primary and state convention to inform voters about the delegate selection process and recruit aspiring delegates, especially minority delegates.

Of course, one of the big barriers to recruiting candidates is the cost of attending the national convention. The Oregon Democratic Party told delegates in 2020 that they might be able to do the Milwaukee convention for $1,300 to $3,100, but in 2016, Bernie Sanders’s delegates were budgeting $3,000 to $5,000 to convene in Philadelphia. The Affirmative Action Committee is charged with implementing a financial assistance program “for persons of low and moderate income to encourage their participation and representation in the national convention delegation”, but delegates will likely have to fundraise or drain their own piggy banks for at least some of their national convention expenses.