The 2025 Legislature approved seven bills and one resolution affecting the initiative and referendum process. Governor Larry Rhoden vetoed the single absolute worst of those bills; the other six took effect yesterday, July 1. The one resolution approved goes to a statewide vote as Amendment L in November 2026.
How do the six new laws affect citizens circulating petitions to put initiatives and referenda on the ballot?
HB 1184—Petition Deadline: The worst of the Legislature’s actions was House Bill 1184, which moves the deadline for submitting signed initiative petitions from six months before the election, on the first Tuesday in May, to nine months before the election, on the first Tuesday in February.
Taking away three months of petition circulation time has a drastic impact on the ability to successfully complete a petition drive. Suppose a group of citizens decide right now, a full 16 months before the election, that they want to put a proposal on the 2026 ballot. If they start the process right now, those eager sponsors can have petitions ready to collect signatures by mid-October. Under the May deadline, those sponsors would have 202 days to collect signatures. HB 1184 cuts their circulation time to 111 days.
To collect the minimum 35,017 signatures required for an initiated amendment, plus a cushion to cover the expected invalid signature rate of 23%, bringing the total to 45,500 signatures, sponsors allowed to work until May 5 would have to collect 226 signatures per day, every day, come heck or high windchill, from October 15 to the day they march their notarized petitions into Monae’s office. HB 1184’s February 3 deadline nearly doubles the necessary signature pace, to 410 signatures per day.
Standing court precedent from 2021 that says any deadline earlier than May violates the First Amendment. Prime sponsor Speaker Jon Hansen (R-25/Dell Rapids) knew about this precedent—he testified in the 2019 trial that produced this precedent and overturned South Dakota’s previous 12-month petition deadline. He knew the state would get sued over a nine-month deadline, but he hornswaggled his colleagues into passing HB 1184 and dragging the state into court again over its persistent effort to stifle ballot questions.
A federal court is considering Dakotans for Health’s lawsuit to restore the May deadline is working through federal court right now. But for the moment, the February deadline is law.
HB 1256—Info from Petition Signers: The bill with the next greatest impact on the practical business of collecting petition signatures is House Bill 1256. Previously, petitions have called for signers to give their residence address. HB 1256, also a product of Speaker Hansen’s fetid mind, now requires petition signers to provide the address at which they are registered to vote instead of the address where they live. Residence and registration addresses often differ: people move and neglect to re-register, students go off to college but stay registered back home….
HB 1256 requires registration addresses on petitions for ballot questions and for candidates. However, only for ballot question petitions does HB 1256 explicitly require the Secretary of State to reject any signature with an address “not substantially the same as the address at which the individual is currently registered to vote”. “Currently” could be problematic: if a Lake County voter signs a petition in September 2025 but then moves to Sioux Falls and registers in January, the registration address she correctly gives in September won’t match what the Secretary “currently” sees on file when she examines the petition in February, and that honest signature from a real voter must be booted. HB 1256 does not explicitly impose the same burden on candidate petitions.
HB 1256 plays another trick on ballot question circulators that it does not play on petitioners for candidates. Previously, state law has specified that a petition signer need only put her signature on the petition. Circulators have been allowed to fill in any of the other information—printed name, address, town, date of signing, and county of voter registration—for the voter, a kindly favor if the voter is in a hurry or has difficulty writing in those teeny-tiny lines on a clipboard on a sidewalk on a windy day. HB 1256 specifies that the voter must provide all of that information, but only on initiative or referendum petitions. HB 1256 explicitly allows the signer or the circulator to add the address, county of registration, and date of signing. That language for ballot questions may be a little fuzzy here—does “provide” really mean the signer must physically write the information itself, or can she still tell the initiative circulator to write it down?—but the safe interpretation is that circulators may no longer correct errors or omissions by signers of initiative and referendum petitions, which creates one more drag on efforts to get valid signatures for ballot questions.
HB 1063—Updating the Fiscal Note: House Bill 1063 won’t affect petition circulators. It could affect the campaign for a ballot measure after it is certified for the ballot. The Legislative Research Council prepares fiscal notes for initiatives that may affect the state’s budget. LRC produces those fiscal notes petitions hit the streets, so circulators may include the fiscal note on their handouts (and now, on their petitions! See Senate Bill 91 below!). The same fiscal note, prepared possibly as much as two years before the election, would appear on the ballot.
HB 1063 sensibly recognizes that new information, new laws, and new economic factors may arise between the time LRC analyzes a proposed initiative prior to petition circulation and the election year. HB 1063 requires the LRC director to review any fiscal note for any measure certified for the ballot. If the LRC director finds that the original fiscal note is “no longer substantially accurate” due to “changes to the state budget, state law, or other factors”, the director must update that note in July. That new fiscal note goes on the ballot.
SB 91—Text on Petitions and Circulator Handouts: Senate Bill 91 is arguably the only net positive change the Legislature has willingly made to the initiative process in the last decade. Previously, sponsors had to print the full text of their initiatives on each petition sheet. Longer initiatives required larger sheets of paper and crowded out signature lines, requiring more sheets and more costly printing. Vision-challenged Senator Al Novstrup (R-3/Aberdeen) made petition-printing more complicated and costly in 2021 by pushing a law to require initiative text to be printed in 14-point font.
SB 91, brought to us by rookie Senator Amber Hulse (R-30/Hermosa) makes printing petitions easier by removing initiative text from the petition. SB 91 keeps the Attorney General’s title and explanation on the petition and adds any fiscal note. Those three items must be in 14-point font, but that’s no big burden, as the AG’s explanation is capped at 200 words and the fiscal note is capped at 50 words.
In a small format tweak, SB 91 requires the title be printed on the back of the petition sheet in 16-point font. That might knock out one signature line, but it will help sponsors and the Secretary of State alike know which petition they are looking at when they are validating signatures, circulators, and notary seals.
Circulators still have to make the initiative text available to all signers, as they ought. But SB 91 moves that text to the circulator handout, in place of the AG explanation and fiscal note. As a circulator, I would much rather hand people on the street the actual text of my initiative than the AG’s and LRC’s interpretations of my initiative. SB 91 imposes no font or format requirements on the circulator handout, so sponsors can lay out their initiative text as they see fit. And even for lengthy initiatives, printing cost will probably go down, since nine out of ten petition signers never take the handout that circulators diligently provide.
SB 92—More Single-Subject Silliness: Senator Hulse makes up for the good petition reform of SB 91 by expanding an unwelcome barrier to initiatives in SB 92. This bill expands the unusual extra-judicial power of the Secretary of State, a power conjured up by supposed big-government-hating Republicans just four years ago, to block initiatives on an arbitrary whim. Under recent legislation, the Secretary can already refuse to allow circulation of initiated amendment petitions if teh Secretary feels they embrace more than one subject or revise rather than simply amend the state constitution. SB 92 extends that single-subject review and possible pre-emption to initiated laws.
The single-subject requirement is unworkably arbitrary in itself. Granting the power to invoke it to strangle an initiative in its crib to a partisan and otherwise strictly ministerial official with no background in constitutional law or lawmaking is ridiculous.
And I must ask: what is the harm of proposing a law or an amendment addressing multiple subjects? What harm accrues if people sign a petition to put such a supposedly complicated measure on the ballot? What damage is done if citizens hear, debate, and vote on a measure that does two distinct things (like 2018 Initiated Measure 25, G. Mark Mickelson’s failed proposal to raise tobacco taxes and spend more on vo-techs), or three, or more?
Amidst this lemon law, we get a little lemonade: SB 92 says the Secretary must decide to exercise this arbitrary power or refrain from using it within 15 working days after receiving the final text of a proposed initiative. A really devious Secretary thus cannot wait until the end of the 100-day review process to surprise a sponsor with an adverse ruling; the Secretary must respond well before the end of the Attorney General’s 80-day period for producing the title and explanation.
SB 106—No Out-of-State Sponsors: Last summer, a Florida man raised a sub-CAFO-level stink by proposing an initiative to require prayer in South Dakota schools. The proposal raised questions, including from Secretary of State Monae Johnson herself, about whether an out-of-stater can sponsor a South Dakota ballot question. In a September 9, 2024, letter to the SOS, Attorney General Marty Jackley said he thinks an initiative sponsor has to be a South Dakota citizen, but he acknowledged that “There is no explicit statute requiring a sponsor of an initiated measure to be a citizen of South Dakota.”
Senate Bill 106 is now that explicit statute, limiting ballot question sponsorship not simply to South Dakota residents but, even more narrowly, to individuals registered to vote in South Dakota.
SB 106 will likely have no impact on petition activity in South Dakota (unless MAGA-fascism spreads and Governor Rhoden deports Rick Weiland to Minnesota). The Florida sponsor of the school prayer mandate hasn’t organized or launched an actual petition drive, thus indicating he, like some other non-resident submitters in the past, are just larking about. The out-of-staters with serious intent and money will simply follow the 2015 example of Henry T. Nicholas and the payday lenders and find local patsies to sign on as titular sponsors.
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Those are the six new laws affecting the process of proposing, petitioning, and voting on ballot measures. The 2025 Legislature also put one change on the 2026 ballot:
HJR 5003/Amendment L—60% to Amend: In 2018, voters rejected Amendment X, a Republican proposal to require a 55% supermajority to amend the South Dakota Constitution. In 2022, voters rejected Amendment C, a Republican proposal to require a 60% supermajority to enact any ballot measure having significant fiscal impact.
Evidently every four years, Republicans are going to try for another supermajority requirement. This Session, Republicans passed House Joint Resolution 5003, now tagged Amendment L, to ask voters at the 2026 election to amend the constitution to require a 60% supermajority to approve any future amendments. Let’s hope voters offer the same response as they did in 2018 and 2022… and let’s hope perhaps beyond hope that Republican figure out that when voters say NO, they mean it.
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The 2025 Legislature had had its way, one more drastic change would have taken effect and likely killed citizen initiatives to amend the state constitution. House Bill 1169 would have enacted a geographical quota on initiated amendment petitions. In addition to gathering signatures from 10% of qualified electors statewide, HB 1169 would have required sponsors to gather signatures from at least 5% of qualified voters from each of South Dakota’s 35 Legislative districts.
That change would have made petitioning physically unworkable. A circulator on any busy sidewalk or at any well-attended public event may encounter voters from any district in the state on any given day. To be ready to take signatures from every willing signer, a circulator would have to carry 35 folders of distinct petition sheets, one for each district, and get each voter to figure out what district she is from. (Pop quiz: what Legislative district do you live in? I will bet that a supermajority of people on the street cannot answer that question immediately without prompting.)
HB 1169 was wrong for many other reasons, which Governor Larry Rhoden helpfully enumerated in his veto letter, one of only two vetoes he issued in his first time at the big desk. Unworkable, unfair, un-grassroots, and possibly unconstitutional by under both the federal and state constitutions—I don’t think Larry Rhoden loves ballot questions any more than the rest of his Republican Party, but even he recognized that HB 1169 went far too far in curtailing South Dakotans’ fundamental right to amend their own constitution.
Wow, this is a VERY comprehensive and valuable list, Cory–thank you!!!
Something that ballot initiative reformers might consider is, instead of eliminating the single-subject prohibition from initiatives (which is very unlikely to be passed), reformers might want to sponsor an initiative tightening (or clarifying) what is and what isn’t a single subject. Had we passed that before the 2020 election, there is a good chance that South Dakota voters would now have the benefit of legalized adult-use marijuana, AND the state treasury would now have the benefit of probably at least $50M a year in the general fund!