Sioux Falls Data Center Referendum Petition Fails; January Chills Signature Collection

Proving that January is a rotten month for circulating petitions, the drive to refer rezoning for a data center in Sioux Falls to a public vote has failed. Even with the signature requirement 11% lower than expected, petitioners failed to collect the 6,704 valid voter signatures necessary to call an election:

A referendum petition consisting of 378 sheets was submitted to the City Clerk’s Office by the submission deadline on January 29, 2026. The referendum petition sought to submit for voter approval a City Ordinance as adopted on January 6, 2026, to rezone property located south of East Rice Street and east of N. Veterans Parkway (Rezone No. 022049-2025). Pursuant to SDCL 9-20-8, a valid petition must be signed by at least five percent of the registered voters in the municipality, which is at least 6,704 valid signatures.

The City Clerk’s office has completed a count of the total number of signatures submitted, which is 5,012 signatures. Even assuming each signature is legally valid and the petition has met all other legal requirements, the total number of signatures submitted of 5,012 is not sufficient to submit the ordinance to an election. By law the City Clerk must and has rejected the petition, and the ordinance remains in effect [City of Sioux Falls, press release, 2026.01.30].

Note that City Clerk Jermery Washington didn’t even get into checking validity of signatures. He didn’t have to. The whole submission had 1,692 fewer signatures than the minimum required. If the circulators matched the 78.8% validity rate we’ve seen for initiative petitions nationwide, their petition would have had only 3,949 valid signatures, only 59% of what they needed to put the data center rezoning to a citywide vote.

Petitioners had 20 days up to the January 29 submission deadline to collect signatures. The temperature in Sioux Falls did not get above freezing for the last eight days of the petition drive. That’s not exactly sidewalk-civic engagement weather.

Through the January chill, the petition drive collected an average of 250 signatures a day. To reach a safe total submission of (minimum requirement x 25% safety cushion) of 8,400 signatures, they would have needed to collect 420 signatures a day.

I notice that the drive organizers were directing circulators to validate signatures using the South Dakota Voter Information Portal before notarizing and submitting their petition sheets. I’ve done validation work like that myself on petitions to get an idea of the signature validity rate. However, to validate signatures via the Voter Information Portal, one must enter the voter’s first name, last name, and either date of birth or ZIP code, plus a five-character anti-bot code. Petitions don’t ask for date of birth or ZIP code. Sioux Falls has 11 ZIP codes. So checking whether a signer is a registered voter in Sioux Falls requires punching the address into the USPS lookup  and using the result or trying up to 11 ZIP codes. Plus, the voter name may vary—Bob may be Bobby or Robert. The time it takes to validate a signature as rigorously as possible on the VIP could be the same amount of time it takes a circulator to collect another signature.

Circulators who spend half of their time collecting signatures and half of their time validating them will collect half as many signatures as circulators who spend all of their time collecting signatures. Effort that produces 5,000 rigorously reviewed signatures could produce 10,000 signatures that the City Clerk is going to check anyway. In this case, 10,000 signatures have a chance of qualifying the measure for the ballot; 5,012 or 6,012 or 6,703 stand no chance, no matter how hard you look at them.

I would therefore recommend that if you’re a volunteer organization with limited time and resources, don’t burn up your circulators’ time with validation tasks. Tell your circulators to spend every minute they can spare getting more signatures. Leave validation to one person in your office, or to the election officials.