Another midterm reform trend to which South Dakotans were impervious was voters’ overwhelming election of Democrats to run their state elections. Consider Georgia, which, just like South Dakota, had a choice in its Secretary of State contest between a black Democrat who promises to make it easier to vote and a white Republican legislator who has voted to restrict voting rights and pushes bogus claims about election integrity. Georgia, unlike South Dakota, chose correctly:
The most closely-watched elections office in the country flipped blue on Tuesday as Georgia, where Donald Trump famously pressured Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” thousands of non-existent votes to overturn his 2020 defeat, overwhelmingly elected Democrat Penny Reynolds Brown to succeed Raffensperger.
She is the first Black woman to be elected secretary of state in Georgia, and will be the first Democrat to hold the job in 20 years. Her top priority, she told Bolts, is to make voting easier for people struggling to contend with the Georgia GOP’s restrictions on early voting, voter ID, and ballot dropboxes.
“It’s not in the Republican Party’s best interest that every eligible Georgian vote,” said Reynolds Brown, a former Fulton County (Atlanta) judge who won by 12 percentage points on Tuesday. She defeated Republican Tim Fleming, who has baselessly alleged that mail voting produces fraud, and backed voting restrictions as a state lawmaker [Alex Burness, “‘The Jig Is Up’: Voters Resoundingly Reject Republicans Who Wanted to Run Elections,” Bolts, 2026.11.06].
Georgia was part of a national demand for honest Democratic administration of free and fair elections:
Out of the states that elected a secretary of state this fall, Democrats swept the swing states, and then some. They won all blue states, plus every state that Trump had won by up to 12 percentage points just two years ago.
They also secured the power to choose who runs elections in many other states—such as Texas, or Pennsylvania—where the secretary of state is appointed.
Out of all 17 states with the tightest 2024 presidential margins, the only one where the GOP is on track to control election administration moving forward is North Carolina—and that’s only because of a Republican power-grab in late 2024 to seize control from the Democratic governor.
…Republicans, meanwhile, flipped zero state elections offices, and had to fight just to hold onto some of their own territory [Burness, 2026.11.06].
South Dakota’s choice of yet another underqualified, democracy-hating Republican to run elections is one more sign of the state’s descent into a rumpish regressivism deeper than that of the Deep South.