After posting seventeen proposals for changes to election law at the November 18 Board of Elections meeting, Secretary of State Monae Johnson has sent seven bills, Senate Bills 28 through 34, to the Legislature for consideration in this year’s Session. The most complicated and consequential of these seven bills is Senate Bill 33, which changes petition signature requirements for candidates and makes other notable technical changes to ballot access.
I’ll get to the signature requirements in a separate post, but I want to turn immediately to a change in the definition of “petition circulator” that violates the First Amendment
SB 33 Section 1 amends the definition of “petition circulator” to include individuals “in the presence of another individual… acting in concert with another petition circulator who physically presents or otherwise makes the petition available to the other individual.”
Occasionally ballot question committees will send new circulators out with experienced trainers to help the circulators learn how to invite voters in for policy conversations, effectively discuss the proposed ballot questions, and comply with all legal requirements in collecting voter signatures and information. I can also imagine scenarios where a national organization promoting some policy initiative might have experts from other states working alongside local circulators at a petition booth at a big event to talk about how that policy initiative has worked in their states.
Under current law [SDCL 12-1-3(12)] of questionable constitutionality and enforceablility, circulators have to be state residents. But in current practice, circulating a petition is understood to entail having your hands on petitions, asking for and collecting signatures, and signing the circulator’s oath on each petition sheet on which you had your hands and obtained signatures.
SB 33 seems to bring back the same sort of overly broad redefinition of “petition circulator” that got 2019 House Bill 1094 thrown out by a federal court. By defining people “acting in concert with” a person who actually has petitions in hand and collects signatures as “petition circulators”, SB 33 subjects those trainers, experts, and anyone else helping the actual circulator on the street corner or at the Sioux Expire Fair booth to the circulator residency requirement.
This simple redefinition thus bans anyone from outside South Dakota—friends from Pipestone, cousins from Gillette, organizers from Denver or Dallas—from speaking in favor of a ballot question to help an actual petition circulator collect signatures.
If your Uncle Fred from Florida visits you in Sioux Falls, and you and Uncle Fred and your wife and brothers head downtown for lunch and Uncle Fred talks with a petition circulator outside Zandbroz, and Uncle Fred says to the circulator, “I’m sorry I can’t sign your petition, since I’m from Florida, but let me get my family for you—hey! kids! Come sign this petition!” Uncle Fred is acting in concert with the circulator, becomes a circulator himself under SB 33, and thus violates the law as rewritten by SB 33. That violation invalidates your signatures on the petition and could get the petition circulator and sponsors in costly legal trouble.
Secretary Johnson, your proposed definition of “petition circulator” prevents people from outside South Dakota from engaging in core political speech. Your office, under you and your predecessor, has lost multiple cases where state laws pertaining to circulating petitions have infringed on core political speech. This new redefinition of “petition circulator”, which doesn’t support or affect the intent of Senate Bill 33 (would you like a single-subject challenge as well?), violates the First Amendment and subjects your office to another loss in court.
Senate Bill 33 has enough complications with its new signature requirements from candidates. Senate State Affairs, spare Secretary Johnson another First Amendment lawsuit by immediately amending SB 33 Section 1 to strike the redefinition of “petition circulator” and remove the lingering and unconstitutional residency requirement for petition circulators.
Of course its illegal. It will always be illegal. Doofus and Republican are interchangeable.
On an aside I’ve mentioned this before but as AI takes over our world it seem relevant. I’m watching an article on La Guardia on CBS Sunday morning so I look up where LaGuardia lived in South Dakota. This is the AI answer. That his family lived in DeSmet and that his mother Laura Ingalls Wilder lived there too. Now you have the AI truth of the world. Luckily its so far off the beam you know it. When it gets more subtle is more problematic.
Yeah, it does seem rather nit picky, if not outrightly unconstitutional. A person circulating a petition can’t be responsible for someone who is trying to be helpful and waves a person over to sign. That happens rarely, and is simply a friend or husband making it known that they could sign a petition. The circulator, though, is the person with the petition. He or she is the one who’s responsible for witnessing the signature. If it were me, I wouldn’t hire a bunch of hawkers to wave people over to the petition circulator. I can see where that blurs things, but if you are goingI to try to outlaw that, what about the people who might be there to wave the people away? Shouldn’t those people have their rights violated in the same way?
@Mark – When older models hallucinate about historical figures, they don’t just miss by a little… they go full “Fiorello LaGuardia lived in De Smet with Laura Ingalls Wilder” energy.
If you want, drop the exact AI prompt you used and I’ll help you unpack why it went off the rails — and give you the actual historical context.
BAH. Petitions should be outlawed completely. At least no out-of-state tomfoolery can go on now, when the big dark out-of-state money tries to foist things on South Dakotans.
grudznick, should we also outlaw out-of-state tomfoolery in the guise of law bills written by bill mills, ALEC, and other interest parties? Those folks do plenty of foisting.
Yes. Those law bills should also be outlawed. The ALEC and law bills from cookie cutter outfits are bad, they are very bad. Those fellows in the legislatures need to write their own bills from their own ideas, or have South Dakota lobbists bring them original ideas.
It’s sad but true that SD schools don’t teach kids to do anything “from their own ideas”. The kids with a modicum of innovation “beat feet” outa your German American stronghold ASAP. Your kids are taught to do what all the other kids do and believe what their prejudiced and disallowing parents believe. Trump lies, for instance. States like SD love “The Don” because he tells their “unsuspecting sponge brains” what to think. Truth be damned.
Don’t believe me? Here’s the list of most and least innovative states.
Least Innovative States
1. District of Columbia 42. Kentucky
2. Massachusetts 43. Iowa
3. Washington 44. Nebraska
4. Maryland 45. South Dakota
5. California 46. Oklahoma
6. Colorado 47. Arkansas
7. Virginia 48. West Virginia
8. Delaware 49. North Dakota
9. New Hampshire 50. Louisiana
10. New Jersey 51. Mississippi
The definition of insanity is…. well, you already know.