The League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union have been cranky about 2026 Senate Bill 175 since rookie wingnut Senator John Carley (R-29/Piedmont) pushed the new voter-suppression measures last Session. Both organizations publicly asked Governor Larry Rhoden to veto SB 175, saying that SB 175 requirement that registrants prove their citizenship would unfairly block South Dakotans from registering to vote due to mere documentary technicalities. Rhoden ignored their plea and signed SB 175, and sure enough, the new law immediately started denying South Dakotans the right to vote.
This summer, the League tried to get the state Board of Elections to cut new voters some slack and allow county auditors to accept photocopies of various ID documents as proof of citizenship. In a curious outburst of gymnastic cowardice, the Board of Elections avoided addressing the problems with SB 175 and the League’s request to mitigate them by cooking up a wildly unprecedented and legally and historically inaccurate interpretation of state law denying the League’s or any other private group’s or individual’s right to participate in state agencies’ rule-making process.
Now the League and Jaysen Hill, a Sioux Falls voter who claims SB 175 denied him the chance to vote in the June 2 primary, are taking the Board of Elections, the Secretary of State, and SB 175 to federal court. The ACLU is helping to represent the plaintiffs. The League and Hill are not challenging the proof-of-citizenship requirement, only how the state and county auditors administer it:
This case does not challenge South Dakota’s decision to request DPOC [documentary proof of citizenship] from registrants to vote in state and local elections. Rather, Plaintiffs seek to remedy senseless inaccuracies and harmful inconsistencies created by the new provision and ensure South Dakota’s administration of its new DPOC requirement complies with federal law. Currently, South Dakota’s implementation of S.B. 175’s new DPOC requirement runs afoul of federal law in at least two ways [plaintiff’s complaint, League of Women Voters of South Dakota and Jaysen Hill v. Secretary of State Monae Johnson and State Board of Elections of South Dakota, U.S. District Court of South Dakota—Southern Division, filed 2026.08.24, p. 2].
The first afoulage arises from a pretty familiar source—Monae Johnson’s inability to give accurate and timely information:
First, South Dakota has failed to provide sufficient notice or cure procedures for voter registration applicants who are assigned “federal-only voter” status due to the DPOC requirement. This violates the guarantee of procedural due process under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Specifically, regardless of the reason for voters’ federal-only status, the State tells all federal-only voters that they “do not meet the requirements to be a South Dakota resident for voting in all elections” because they provided a non-residential or commercial address on their registration form. In other words, the state erroneously informs voters with DPOC-related problems that their state election registration had actually been rejected for other, inaccurate reasons. Without accurate information, federal-only voters have no effective notice and no opportunity to fix the problem with their voter registration application to become full-ballot voters who can participate in state and local elections.
The State knows its voter registration rejection notice forms are inaccurate because they have not been updated since S.B. 175 passed, but they have inexplicably refused to resolve this problem before the November 2026 General Election. This inadequate notice and lack of effective opportunity to cure the problem denies these registrants the guarantee of procedural due process that guard their right to vote in state and local elections [complaint, League and Hill v. SOS and Board, 2026.08.24, pp. 2–3].
For their second ground, plaintiffs litigify the League’s ignored petition to the Board on photocopies, saying that refusing to accept photocopies of driver licenses, state ID cards, and tribal ID cards violates federal law:
Second, the State requires that the three most commonly-carried forms of DPOC—driver licenses, nondriver state identification cards, and Tribal identification cards—be presented in original rather than photocopy form while accepting other indistinguishable forms of DPOC via photocopy. This differential treatment violates the Materiality Provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits state officials from denying the right to vote based on an error or omission in a voter registration form when that error or omission is not material to the voter’s qualifications.
Hard copies of these three forms of identification do not convey any material information that photocopies lack. And that immateriality is especially glaring considering the law’s requirement that election officials accept photocopies of any other form of DPOC, including birth certificates and passports. Thus, the format a registrant’s DPOC comes in—photocopy versus original—“is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote in such election.” 52 U.S.C. § 10101(a)(2)(B) [complaint, League and Hill v. SOS and Board, 2026.08.24, pp. 3].
The plaintiffs aren’t asking the court to block SB 175 in toto. The League and Hill are still fine with the state demoting Hill and at least 1,500 other South Dakotans to “federal only” status and denying their participation in state and local elections for failure to prove their citizenship. The plaintiffs just want the court to require that Secretary Johnson “provid[e] affected voters with adequate and meaningful notice and an opportunity to cure” that limited voting status and issue guidance to the same effect to county auditors. The plaintiffs do ask the court to enjoin SB 175’s rejection of ID card photocopies and Secretary Johnson’s interpretation that documents proving citizenship be presented in person to election officials rather than to folks like LWV conducting voter registration drives.
The plaintiffs could cowboy up to a full challenge of SB 175. The day after they filed their suit, a federal judge in Ohio preliminarily enjoined that state’s 2025 law requiring voters to documentarily prove their citizenship, saying it violates the National Voting Rights Act provision that states “may require only the minimum information necessary to…enable state election officials to assess the eligibility of the applicant.” Said Judge Solomon Oliver Jr., “(A)s the rest of Ohio’s voter registration scheme demonstrates, and Defendants’ statements at the Hearing shows, election officials do not need documentary proof of citizenship to assess a voter registration applicant’s citizenship because signed attestation of citizenship is enough.” Before SB 175, South Dakota voters signed a registration form that included the declaration, “I am a citizen of the United States of America.”