South Dakotans for Fair Taxes has 49 days to collect the 17,508 signatures it needs to refer Senate Bill 245, the statewide property tax/sales tax swap, to a public vote in November.
If you sign SDFT’s petition, your petition circulator will offer you a handout mandated by law (SDCL 2-1-3.1) bearing the title of SB 245, the names and contact info of the three petition sponsors, and a note that circulator is a volunteer.
In an encouraging sign of SDFT’s grassroots frugality, the approved circulator handouts are strictly for volunteer circulators; the group has not submitted for the Secretary of State’s approval a circulator handout for paid circulators. Most petition drives use paid circulators, but the last referendum to make the ballot, 2024’s successful drive against that year’s Senate Bill 201, the controversial property rights bill that smelled of favors for carbon dioxide pipeliners, involved volunteer circulators exclusively. That drive proved that public fervor can still achieve what usually requires deep political pockets.
In another sign of political frugality, SDFt is keeping its printing costs down by printing six handouts per sheet of paper:
SDCL 2-1-3.1 requires petitions to bear the law’s title, the law’s effective date, and the election date in fourteen-point font and a petition title on the back side of the petition in sixteen-point font. But the law sets no font or format requirements for the circulator handout, only content. So conceivably, petitioners could format documents that squeeze eight, sixteen, or more handouts to a single sheet, and the Secretary of State could approve handouts the size of bubble-gum wrappers (oh! which would be a heck of an idea: thank signers with little candies wrapped in the circulator handout! We could include the legally mandated text plus a Bazooka Joe cartoon making fun of the legislators who came up with the bad idea the petitioners want voters to pop!)
Volunteers for the SB 245 referendum probably won’t wrap these handouts around gum or mints. they will cut these sheets into six equal pieces that will fit easily into the same pocket as their phones. When you sign the petition, your circulator will offer you one of these little snippets, roughly 4.25 x 3.67 inches. You don’t have to take one, and my experience is that well over 90% of signers do not take one. A circulator should carry enough of these little rectangles to hand one to every signer, but practically speaking, if a circulator collects 100 signatures, that circulator will actually distribute only 10 handouts. Circulators, print yourselves ten of these sheets, and you’ll probably unload only one or two sheets’ worth of handouts.
The circulator handout law requires petitioners to waste a lot of paper. This all-volunteer (so far) referendum drive is at least reducing that waste with efficient paper usage.