The sponsors of the initiative to replace property taxes with a retail transaction tax moved quickly this weekend to keep their petition drive alive, and the wheels of bureaucracy have spun quickly in response. After receiving the Attorney General’s expedited final title and explanation on Friday, Mike Mueller, Julie Frye-Mueller, and Matt Smith cranked out their petition paperwork and rushed it to the Capitol on Monday, the deadline for submitting new 2026 initiative petitions. Secretary of State Monae Johnson, who’s been too busy to appear before the Government Operations and Audit Committee, immediately reviewed all of that paperwork and approved the local-government-destroying petition for circulation.
The property-tax ban/retail transaction tax is the third and final initiative approved for petitioning in this election cycle. It is also the first petition approved under the new rules of 2025 Senate Bill 91 and 2025 House Bill 1256.
SB 91 has wrought the most visible and useful changes. Thanks to this new law, initiative petitions no longer include the full text of the proposed law or constitutional amemdment. The initiative petition now simply bears the Attorney General’s title and explanation and the Legislative Research Council’s fiscal note. SB 91 also helpfully requires sponsors to print the title of the initiative on the back of the petition in 16-point font. Before SB 91, the Secretary of State didn’t allow any title to be printed on the back side of petitions. SB 91’s back title helps voters, sponsors, and reviewers looking at the back side of a petition sheet, which usually bears only voter signature lines and the circulator oath, know which petition they have in hand.
Petitioners still have to have the full text of their initiatives in hand; SB 91 added that text to the infamous circulator handout. Prior to SB 91, circulator handouts needed to have the title, explanation, fiscal note, sponsor contact information, declaration of the circulator’s status as volunteer or paid, and, if paid, the circulator’s rate of pay. That information fit legibly on a quarter sheet of paper. Adding the initiative text to comply with SB 91 makes Team Mueller’s handout a full page printed in small font. But without SB 91’s wise reform, the sponsors would have had to print their entire nine-section amendment in 14-point font on their petition sheets, which would have been impossible on any standard letter- or legal-sized sheet of paper.
Less visible but crucial to signature-gathering is the change required by HB 1256. Previously, petition signers had to include their residence address. HB 1256 requires that signers provide the address at which they are registered to vote. Those addresses can differ: an SDSU student may live in Hansen Hall in Brookings during the school year while maintaining her voter registration back in Madison in Lake County.
Signers and circulators alike must thus pay attention to which petition they are working with. The two other initiative petitions on the street, Dakotans for Health’s initiative-reform petitions, were approved for circulation last spring, before HB 1256 took effect. Dakotans for Health’s petitions (here and here) thus require signers to provide their residence address. A circulator working for both campaigns may have to collect different addresses for a single signer: “Oh, you currently reside on campus in Brookings, but you still vote in Lake County? O.K., on these first two petitions, put your campus address in Brookings. On this third petition, put your voting address in Lake County.”
Petition signers will also notice that circulators will be carrying two very different petitions and circulator handouts, The Dakotans for Health petitions—again, approved before the July 1 enactment of SB 91—have to show the full text of their proposed amendments; the Mueller petition does not. Dakotans for Health circulators will offer you palm-sized handouts that do not include the full text of their proposals; Mueller circulators must give you a full-sized paper with the full text of their amendment.
The difference between these petitions will also complicate the Secretary of State’s validation process. When reviewing Dakotans for Health’s signed petitions, the Secretary will only need to check for the existence of a complete address. When reviewing Team Mueller’s signed petition, the Secretary will have to check that the signers’ addresses match the addresses they submitted when they registered to vote.
These complications—different addresses required for different petitions, two different petition forms, two different circulator handouts, two sets of rules for evaluating different petitions circulated at the same time and submitted for the same election—arise only in this election cycle, where the Legislature changed the initiative process midstream, while some petitions were already in the works while others had not yet headed for the streets. If the Legislature can keep its stinking paws off the initiative process for a couple Sessions (please? please?!), we can have a nice normal petition process next time around.
The petition Secretary Johnson approved for Team Mueller to circulate reflects HB 1256’s new address requirement, even though the Board of Elections appears not to have changed Administrative Rule 5:02:08:00.03, which sets the form of all petitions—ballot question and candidate nomination—and still as of this morning directs signers to give their residence address. The petition forms available on the Secretary of State’s website also conform to the old residence requirement and not the voter-registration-address requirement of HB 1256.
With her approval of the property-tax-ban petition, Secretary Johnson issued her single-subject statement, certifying that banning one tax and imposing another is really one subject. This legally mandated but ridiculously extra-judicial finding is not binding; anyone inclined to challenge the Mueller’s initiative on the grounds that it violates South Dakota’s requirement that initiatives embrace just one subject are still free to take such a challenge to court… though I suspect Governor Larry Rhoden and other opponents of this plan won’t go to that trouble unless the proponents collect and submit 35,017 voter signatures by the current legal deadline of May 5, 2026.
Add a 20% cushion for inevitable error, and Team Mueller needs to collect at least 44,000 signatures in six months. That’s a high hill to climb, but if they re done dilly-dallying and act with the due haste they showed this weekend, they have a shot at success.