Independent candidate for U.S. Senate Brian Bengs has posted the best validity rate for petition signatures of any statewide candidate this election season. In her press release Tuesday announcing she has certified Bengs for the November ballot, Secretary of State Monae Johnson said 93.85% of the signatures in her random sample of 630-some signatures from Bengs’s nominating petition were valid. She calculates that Bengs submitted 4,311 valid signatures. Those figures indicate Bengs submitted 4,594 signatures, more than a thousand above the 3,502 that independents need to qualify for the general election ballot.
Bengs will thus appear on the November ballot with incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Mike Rounds (91.13% signature validity rate) and Democratic candidate Julian Beaudion (90.32%).
Bengs beat Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Ahlers by a half a percentage point to claim top spot for signature validity this season. Including Bengs’s signatures, 86.9% of signatures submitted on the 13 statewide candidate petitions this year were valid. [I have updated my table on 2026 statewide candidate petition validity on my original April 14 post on the topic.]
That number matters for people planning petition drives, especially for the pending initiatives and the referendum on the streets right now, as it indicates that you can expect 13 or 14 out of every 100 signatures you collect to have errors that will disqualify them. If you need 17,508 signatures to place a referendum on the ballot, and if your circulators have that error rate, you would need to collect at least 20,150 signatures to succeed. If your circulators perform as well as Team Bengs, you could get by with only 18,660 signatures. But if your validity rate matches the sloppiest of the statewide candidates, Toby Doeden (who qualified for the gubernatorial ballot) and Robert Arnold (who did not), and falls below 80%, you’ll need to collect over 22,000 signatures.
Don’t assume your circulators are as good as Bengs’s. Look at the empirical data for this cycle, be cautious, and aim for at least a 20% cushion in signatures.
Nobody is independent. South Dakota needs to change that registration label.