Thank goodness Marty Jackley is doing Monae Johnson’s job. Thanks to the Attorney General’s posting of documents relating to the proposed 2028 raw-milk deregulation initiative, we know that sponsor Brenda Anderson has already broken the law and invalidated—or at least delayed—her petition drive.
Attorney General Jackley has posted Anderson’s first initiative draft and the Legislative Research Council’s suggested style, form, and clarity edits. The LRC’s May 14 letter and Anderson’s own initial e-mail show that Anderson submitted her draft for review on May 1, 2026:
SDCL 12-13-25 says sponsors may submit an initiative to the LRC for review “not more than six months before it may be circulated for signatures….” SDCL 2-1-1.2 says sponsors may not circulate petitions “more than twenty-four months before the general election” at which the sponsors seek a vote on their initiative. The 2028 general election is on November 7. SPonsors may begin circulating petitions for 2028 ballot initiatives on November 7, 2026. The earliest anyone could submit initiative drafts for LRC review this year was May 7. Anderson submitted her initiative for review six days before that, on May 1. Anderson thus violated SDCL 12-13-25.
Director McCullough, who resigned a month after signing off on the LRC’s May 14 comments on Anderson’s initiative, didn’t catch that error. The LRC even did Anderson the favor of taking only nine of the fifteen working days allowed by SDCL 12-13-25 to produce its detailed response.
While appreciate the LRC and any other state officials who might cut citizens some slack in their effort to participate in the over-complicated initiative process, the law is the law. Anderson submitted her first draft prior to the legal starting date. The LRC had no authority to consider this illegally submitted draft. Absent a legally authorized review by the LRC, Anderson had no legal right to submit a revised draft of her initiative to the Attorney General for review and cannot proceed to submit a final petition to the Secretary of State for approval for circulation.
At minimum, the Attorney General needs to stop this illegal process and require that Anderson resubmit draft language to the Legislative Research Council for review, which would be perfectly legal now that May 7 has passed. If the LRC (which has already demonstrated its generosity) and AG act quickly, they could still produce the comment, title and explanation, and fiscal note necessary to allow Anderson to begin circulating her petition by November 7, 2026, the earliest possible legal date for collecting signatures for the 2028 election.
But if the Attorney General does not stop the process and if the Secretary of State allows Anderson to circulate her petition based on Anderson’s premature May 1 draft submission to the LRC, opponents of Anderson’s initiative could go to court and have her petition and initiative ruled illegal based on Anderson’s violation of SDCL 12-13-25… and they could take that legal action at a much later date—say November 2027—that would leave Anderson no time after an adverse ruling to restart the process and put raw-milk deregulation to a public vote in 2028.
p.s.: Initiative sponsor Arthur Taylor broke this same law in 2021, submitting three constitutional amendments for the 2024 election on December 15, 2021, nearly five months before the May 5, 2022, starting date for the 2024 initiative process. The LRC didn’t blink at that violation then, either. We didn’t get to test Taylor’s violation in court, since Taylor never followed up by submitting and circulating petitions for his proposed initiated amendments.