A District 15 denizen asks if the sharp decline in South Dakota’s midterm voter turnout from 59.40% in 2022 to 49.37% this year might be connected to the purging of RV voters and the relegation of thousands of voters who didn’t have citizenship documents handy (and some incorrectly de-registered residents) to “federal-only” status. A look at the numbers suggests those voter-suppression tactics may have depressed turnout a little but not enough to explain the remarkable disinterest statewide in this year’s election.
Both the 2025 laws restricting voting residency to individuals who have lived in South Dakota for 30 consecutive days before registering and restricting individuals unable to establish such stable abodery to voting only for President and Congress and the 2026 law pushing “federal-only” status onto voters who don’t present documentation proving their citizenship have reduced the full-fledge voter rolls. Sioux Falls lost 16,965 voters between January 2025 and January 2026, the most likely explanation being the loss of registration from thousands of RV voters previously registered at Sioux Falls mailbox services. Last month, South Dakota Searchlight found 4,800 out of 5,735 “federal-only” voters registered at commercial mail-forwarding services or post office boxes.
However many of the thousands of RV voters may have gotten fed up with South Dakota’s infringement of their liberty and dropped from the rolls or registered in friendlier states, the plain fact is that South Dakota has more registered voters now than it did before these anti-voter changes. Since 2024 general election, South Dakota added 3,371 registered voters, a 0.54% increase. We certainly slowed the growth curve: from 2000 to 2024, the number of registered voters in South Dakota grew at an average rate of 2.35% each election cycle, a net gain of 12,670 every two years.
| Year | Registered Active | 2-year growth% | 2-year growth |
| 2026 | 628,563 | 0.54% | 3,371 |
| 2024 | 625,192 | 4.71% | 28,119 |
| 2022 | 597,073 | 3.18% | 18,407 |
| 2020 | 578,666 | 6.32% | 34,384 |
| 2018 | 544,282 | -0.03% | -146 |
| 2016 | 544,428 | 4.49% | 23,387 |
| 2014 | 521,041 | -1.43% | -7,580 |
| 2012 | 528,621 | 1.78% | 9,260 |
| 2010 | 519,361 | -2.09% | -11,101 |
| 2008 | 530,462 | 4.60% | 23,330 |
| 2006 | 507,132 | 0.57% | 2,867 |
| 2004 | 504,265 | 5.50% | 26,279 |
| 2002 | 477,986 | 1.02% | 4,834 |
| 2000 | 173,152 | ||
| average change cycle to cycle: | 2.35% | 12,670 | |
| average change general to midterm: | 0.20% | 1,214 |
And growth in the voter rolls is usually much slower in midterm years. In this century, voter registration actually decreased in 2010, 2014, and 2018. Since 2000, midterm voter roll growth has averaged 0.20%, or 1,214 more voters than the preceding general election. So even with the new residency and proof-of-citizenship requirements, South Dakota still posted a net gain in registered voters nearly three times larger than history suggests we could expect in a midterm year.
However many RV voters and folks lacking proof of citizenship South Dakota’s new laws may have turned away from the polls and the rolls, the plain fact is that we had 3,371 more voters for the 2026 election than we did for the 2024 election. More importantly and statistically validly for discussing voter turnout, we had 31,490 more registered voters for the 2026 midterm than we did for the 2022 midterm, a 5.27% increase that is larger than any midterm-over-midterm growth since 2006. If South Dakota’s 2026 electorate had turned out at the same 59.40% rate as the 2022 electorate, we’d have seen 63,000 more voters participating in this midterm general election.
Even if all 5,735 voters relegated to federal-only status all found their truncated ballots (just two races: U.S. Senate and U.S. House) too boring to bother with, something else deterred ten times as many regular registered voters from casting votes this year for those two offices and all the state and local candidates and ballot measures before them.
p.s.: My District 15 correspondent has reason to be concerned about low turnout and the factors driving it. District 15 suffered one of the biggest declines in voter turnout in the state. The Democratic-dominated downtown Sioux Falls district cast 25.77% fewer votes in this year’s District 15 Senate race than it did in the 2022 midterm election—5,201 votes this year versus 7,007 in 2022. Those 1,806 fewer voters in this midterm is just a little less than the 1,859 voters whom South Dakota Searchlight reported last month have been demoted to “federal-only” status in Minnehaha County. District 15 is home to at least a couple mail-forwarding services, one of which, Dakota Post, had 4,742 registered voters in 2024, 1,759 of whom voted in the 2024 general election.
pp.s.: 63,000 fewer voters—that’s still smaller than the margin of victory of every statewide candidate in this election but one: Don Haggar beat Frank Kloucek in the Public Utilities Commissioner race by 59,355 votes. If all 63,078 of the voters predicted by 2022-level turnout had shown up Tuesday, they could have put Kloucek on the PUC… if 97.05% of them had voted Democratic. One can dream….
They don’t want a potential pope to vote.