Secretary of State Monae Johnson’s packet of election-reform proposals includes a proposal to base signature requirements for candidate petitions on voter registration totals rather than gubernatorial election turnout. In the context of partisan primaries, this proposal improves on the current signature requirements, as voter registration is a more rational and practically calculated basis for petition requirements than election turnout. But it’s still not as equitable as a nominating process that would require every candidate for a given office to collect the same number of voter signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Here are the signature thresholds in Proposal 14:
14. An Act to modify signature requirements based on the number of votes received at the most recent gubernatorial election.
- This bill will simplify signature requirements based on the number of votes
received at the most recent gubernatorial election by replacing them with new
signature requirements based on the number of registered voters recorded on the
second Tuesday of December.- Partisan Statewide Candidates – 1% of the number of voters registered with their
party or two thousand, whichever is less.- Partisan Legislative or County Candidates – 1% of the number of voters registered
with their party in the county or district or fifty, whichever is less.- Independent Statewide Candidates – 0.5% of the total number of voters registered
in the state or three thousand five hundred, whichever is less.- Independent Legislative or County Candidates – 0.5% of the total number of voters
registered in the county or district or one hundred fifty, whichever is less.- Formation of a New Political Party – 1% of the total number of voters registered in
the state or three thousand five hundred, whichever is less [Secretary of State Monae Johnson, proposed bills for 2026 Legislative Session, presented to State Board of Elections 2025.11.18].
Compiling a table comparing the current 2022 turnout-based requirements to Proposal 14’s registration-based criteria sold me on Proposal 14. I started the table to figure out how much Proposal 14 would help or hurt candidates from different parties (I’ll get to that below). But before I could do that, I was struck by the complexity and inconsistency of the current signature rules.
Under current law (SDCL 12-6-7), figuring out how many signatures candidates need requires sifting through the 2022 vote tallies. That’s easy enough for Democratic and Republican candidates for statewide office: count each party’s vote total for Governor, divide by 100, round up to the nearest whole number—presto! 1,232 for Democratic candidates, 2,171 for Republicans. But Libertarians, with their alternative political status (SDCL 12-1-3.1), have to collect 1% of their highest statewide tally, which was not their gubernatorial candidate Tracey Quint, who won 9,983 votes) but their U.S. House candidate Collin Duprel, who ran against Dusty Johnson without a Democratic challenger and thus won 74,020 votes. The absence of a Democratic House candidate in 2022 thus penalizes statewide Libertarian candidates by raising their statewide signature petition requirement from 100 to 741.
Legislative candidates have an even harder time figuring out their signature requirements, since we don’t publish breakdowns of the gubernatorial vote (or, for the Libertarians, the U.S. House vote) by Legislative district. Worse, in districts that include parts of counties using vote centers (e.g., Brown, Brookings, Clay, Hughes, Hyde), we don’t get specific counts for the precincts that constitute different districts, because residents of those districts may vote at any vote center in the county. The Legislature had to carve out an exception for such data-deprived districts and set a flat 50-signature requirement.
SOS Johnson’s Proposal 14 sensibly gets rid of the need to consult the election almanac and quirky exceptions to calculate petition signature requirements. Proposal 14 instead directs us to the voter registration totals, which the Secretary publishes for the state, counties, and Legislative districts.
However, the Secretary creates one little extra bit of work for herself. Proposal 14 bases signature counts on “the number of registered voters recorded on the second Tuesday of December”. I assume she means the second Tuesday of December in the year immediately preceding the election (though she’d better spell that out in her final Legislative language!). The SOS publishes a daily statewide voter registration count, but the SOS website offers no feature that shows us the voter totals for the state, counties, or Legislative districts on the second Tuesday of December. SOS Johnson archives monthly reports from the first business day of each month, plus primary and general election days, not the second Tuesday. The Secretary will need to add the second Tuesday of December to her reporting schedule.
Proposal 14 also creates a minor inconvenience for candidates. Under the current system, after a gubernatorial election, candidates know their signature requirements for the next four years. Under Proposal 14, candidates won’t know for sure until the second Tuesday of December, just three weeks before they can start their petition drives on January 1 (SDCL 12-6-8), exactly how many signatures they’ll need to collect. When I campaign, I want all of my legal details nailed down before I launch.
That inconvenience won’t have much practical impact—the couple thousand by which voter registration totals might change in a year mean petition signature totals might change by just a couple dozen for a statewide independent campaigner, and smart campaigners will gobble that difference up with signature collections cushions. Besides, at over 320,000 registered voters, Republicans would now and for the foreseeable future default to Proposal 14’s 2,000 maximum for statewide candidates. In steady decline since 2008, Democrats can look at the voter registration total on any given day and figure, “Well, by December, it’ll be less!” And whatever happens with Libertarians, until they reach 2.5% of the electorate (they haven’t cracked 0.5% yet), Libertarians can use their alternative party status to skip the petition process and just seek nomination at the Libertarian convention.
Aside from resolving the unfairness to independents in our most populous counties, Proposal 14 probably doesn’t matter much to county and Legislative candidates, who generally need only a few dozen signatures under either current law or SOS Johnson’s proposed scheme to get on the ballot. On the big, time-consuming statewide petition drives, Proposal 14 requires Democrats to get more signatures while making ballot access easier for everyone else:
| Change in signatures required for… | ||||
| Office | Democrats | Republicans | independents | Libertarians |
| Statewide | +15% | –8% | –11% | –96% |
| Legislature (average) | –3% | +1% | +8% | –95% |
| County (average) | +30% | +27% | –17% | –72% |
A reset to a fairer system doesn’t mean everybody gets a break. It would be even fairer to get rid of signature requirements that treat party members and independents differently and set the same standard for every candidate who wants to be on the ballot: “You want to run for office? Go get signatures from X% of all voters in your state/county/district.” But even in that ideal system, any threshold above a mere 0.2% of total registered voters would increase South Dakota’s Democratic statewide signature requirement while drastically decreasing everyone else’s.
But we shouldn’t be considering advantages based on party affiliation. When we write policy for running elections and putting into action citizens’ political rights, we should put on the veil of ignorance (not willful MAGA stupidity, but the moral position that we create laws without considering how specific individuals, including ourselves, stand to gain or lose). So without looking at the changes Proposal 14 would exert on different partisan candidates under the specific conditions of this moment, I’m inclined to say that petition signature requirements based on voter registration totals will be clearer and fairer than the current requirements tied to results of the last gubernatorial/midterm election.