RV Voters Purged?
Petitioners working to refer zoning for a data center to a public vote in Sioux Falls learned this week that they need to collect a thousand fewer signatures than they might have expected to call an election.
Sioux Falls residents began collecting signatures for their referendum petition on January 9; they have until January 29 to file their petition. To trigger a public vote, state law (SDCL 9-20-8) requires that the petition be signed by at least 5% of the registered voters in the city as counted on the second Tuesday of January of the year the petition is filed—i.e., last Tuesday, January 13.
As KELO-TV reported when the petition drive launched, the number of registered voters in Sioux Falls last year, January 14, 2025, was 151,038. Calling a referendum vote in Sioux Falls last year would have required 7,552 signatures.
But City Clerk Jermery J. Washington announced Thursday that the data from the Minnehaha and Lincoln county auditors show that Sioux Falls lost 16,965 voters since last January’s count, an 11.23% drop, to a January 13, 2026 tally of 134,073. That means the signature threshold to put the rezoning ordinance on the ballot is only 6,704, 848 fewer than last year.
This depletion of the voter rolls is all the more dramatic given Mayor Paul TenHaken’s announcement this week that the population of his fair city grew from 219,588 in 2024 to 224,676 in 2025, a remarkable one-year growth rate of 2.32%. That’s just a little faster than the 2.20% annual growth rate Census figures give for Sioux Falls from 2010 to 2024. It’s double South Dakota’s post-covid growth rate, and it beats the pants off statewide growth rates across the nation.
So if voter registration had grown at the same rate as population, Sioux Falls would have over 154,000 registered voters, and the 5% threshold for referring a Sioux Falls City Council action to a public vote would be 7,727 signatures, 175 more than last year. But the city’s updated voter report shows that Sioux Falls petitioners need a thousand fewer signatures than we’d have expected to put measures to a vote.
The sharp decline in voter registration doesn’t square with the trends in the statewide voter rolls. Overall, from January 2, 2025, to January 2, 2026, statewide voter registration shrank just 1.04%. Minus Sioux Falls, the state’s registered voter tally increased 2.18%—close to Sioux Falls’s population growth rate—from 477,538 at the beginning of January 2025 to 487,967 at the beginning of January 2026.
So how does Sioux Falls shed nearly 17,000 voters when, by local population growth and voter roll growth in the rest of South Dakota, it should have gained more than 3,000 voters?
My best guess is that last year’s House Bill 1066 and House Bill 1208, which require individuals to maintain residence in South Dakota for at least 30 consecutive days to qualify to vote in state and local elections, may have had its intended effect of purging from the rolls thousands of RVers who used to be able to register to vote using Sioux Falls’s various mailbox centers.
Whatever the reasons for the decline in Sioux Falls voters, petitioners should not ease back from their goal of collecting 10,000 signatures to put the data center rezoning to a city-wide vote. But they can breathe a little easier knowing that the number of signatures they actually need is a thousand less than expected. 6,704 valid registered voter signatures by January 29—make it happen!