The League of Women Voters and Sioux Falls voter Jaysen Hill got their day in federal court this week to argue to District Judge Eric Schulte that the implementation of 2026 Senate Bill 175 is unjustly infringing on voter rights through contradictory documentation rules and inaccurate information from the Secretary of State. With early voting starting next Friday, Judge Schulte is promising a swift ruling:
Federal judge Eric Schulte promised a ruling in a voter registration case in South Dakota next week.
“The timeline here is of the essence,” Schulte said in court in Sioux Falls Friday.
…The timeline is important because the absentee voting starts Sept. 18, which is followed by the November general election [Rae Yost, “Judge Says Ruling Next Week on Voter Registration Case,” KELO-TV, 2026.09.11].
A ruling for the plaintiffs won’t block SB 175. Aspiring voters will still have to prove their citizenship to register; this lawsuit only seeks to allow voters to submit photocopies of driver licenses, tribal ID cards, and other nondriver IDs to get on the voting roll and to direct Secretary of State Monae Johnson to stop confusing voters.
the problem with photo copies of drivers licenses is that while your photo, address, date of birth are on the front, none of that info is carried over onto the back, where the citizenship status is. So a non-citizen could easily present a photocopy of the front of his driver’s license and the flip side of a citizen’s license and the person adding him to the voter rolls would not be able to tell, without a scanner to read the codes on the back.
Likewise, your passport identifies you as a US citizen but not as a resident of any state. it just identifies the state in which you were born. You would still need to prove your address.
I think the question I want answered is “why does the League of Women Voters think registering people to vote should be their job anyway?” We pay county auditors to do that. Is this their way of feeling relevant? Important? Don’t those old ladies have grandchildren, or cats? Maybe what they all need are cats.
Algebra, any organization or individual can register people for the vote. It’s done all the time. And the League of Women Voters does just what their title states, they get women to vote. They don’t deny voter applications to anyone, however.
We need more visible orgs to get out and help register people to vote.