Rural Students Real Opportunity, the group working to dissolve the Oldham-Ramona-Rutland school district, is calling for a recount of the close December 16 vote that rejected dissolution. They’re also challenging the counting of five provisional ballots:
RSRO said in a Facebook post the five provisional ballots were cast by voters whose residency was challenged and ruled invalid by the Rutland precinct board on Election Day. Citing SDCL §§ 12-18-10 and 13-7-4.2, precinct boards, not election administrators, have exclusive authority to decide residency challenges in school elections. Those decisions are final unless overturned by a court.
RSRO claims that ORR Superintendent Dawn Hoeke did not have legal authority to reverse the decision of the precinct board regarding voter residency. The precinct board lawfully exercised its exclusive authority to determine that five voters failed to meet the residency requirements of SDCL § 13-7-4.2 and were ineligible to vote. Once that determination was made, the ballots were invalid and could not be resurrected by Hoeke [Michael Doorn, “Oldham-Ramona-Rutland District Vote Heads for Recount,” KELO-TV, 2025.12.24].
Actually, election administrators do appear to have the authority to reverse precinct board decisions on residency. Voters challenged and rebuffed by the precinct board under SDCL 12-18-10 can still cast provisional ballots under SDCL 12-18-39. Those provisional ballots go to the person in charge of the election for validation:
Prior to the official canvass, the person in charge of the election shall determine if the person voting by provisional ballot was legally qualified to vote in the precinct in which the provisional ballot was cast. In making this determination, the person in charge of the election shall consider the information provided on the affirmation and diligently investigate the voter registration status of the person. If there is no evidence that a voter registration form had been completed by the person showing a residence address in that precinct and returned to an official voter registration site prior to the deadline to register to vote for the election, the provisional ballot is invalid [SDCL 12-20-5.1, enacted 2003].
RSRO may certainly argue that the superintendent did not accurately determine the residency of the voters who cast provisional ballots, but it does not appear that they can challenge the superintendent’s statutory authority to validate those ballots.
And even if RSRO can find some other grounds on which to disqualify all four provisional ballots, they’ll still need to flip one more vote in the recount to change the outcome. Without the provisional ballots, the vote was still a tie, blocking dissolution.