Joshua Haiar, South Dakota Searchlight
For more than two months, state officials unintentionally led some potential legislative candidates to believe they needed hundreds more petition signatures than state law requires.
The problem affected independents. Retired Rapid City attorney Jay Davis noticed it.
“I was seeking information on behalf of a prospective candidate who was considering filing as an independent,” he said. “I asked how many signatures she would need in her district.”
Davis was referencing nominating petitions. To earn a spot on the ballot, candidates need signatures on their petitions from registered voters in their district. The window for circulating and submitting petitions opened Jan. 1 — the same day the erroneous signature guidance was published — and will close for independent candidates on April 30.
The Secretary of State’s Office oversees elections in South Dakota. Davis said Rachel Soulek, director of the office’s Division of Elections, initially refused to look up the information and told him to find it on the office’s website.
“Later, she forwarded me the applicable information from the website, and I was horrified,” Davis said.
For example, the list said independent legislative candidates in Sioux Falls-area Districts 12 and 13 needed 1,029 signatures. On March 8, after Davis reported the errors, the numbers were changed to 114 and 88, respectively. Numbers for many other districts were also updated at that time.
State law requires a number of signatures equal to 1% of the votes cast within the district in the last governor’s race. The number of people in each legislative district is roughly equal and based on numbers from the 2020 Census, which determined the total population of South Dakota was 886,667. There are 35 legislative districts, making the target number for each 25,333 people. Therefore, even if every person in a district voted in the last governor race, the maximum number of signatures required in any district would be about 250.
But on the erroneous list published by the Secretary of State’s Office, independent candidates in Rapid City-area Districts 34 and 35, for example, were listed as needing 454 signatures. On March 8, the figures were changed to 115 and 99, respectively.
Davis doesn’t think that fully addresses the problem.
“There may already be people who looked into running as independents for the South Dakota Senate and House who abandoned the idea, after looking at the onerous signature requirements,” he said.
Soulek, with the Secretary of State’s Office, communicated with South Dakota Searchlight only by email and did not accept phone calls. She offered a lengthy explanation of the events leading up to the publication of the erroneous list. The explanation culminated in a final sentence: “A staff person had an error in our calculations when putting the signature requirements together.”
Soulek said the office notified county auditors, who run elections at the county level, once the information was updated.
Davis said the ultimate responsibility lies with the current head of the Secretary of State’s Office, Monae Johnson, who did ultimately call him to discuss the error. But, Davis alleged, “my understanding is that some of the numbers for independent signature requirements on their website are still wrong.”
As of Friday afternoon, no independent candidates had submitted nominating petitions to become candidates for legislative offices in the Nov. 5 general election.
There are about 88,000 registered independent voters in the state and 61,000 people registered as non-politically affiliated. There are about 145,000 registered Democrats and 302,00 Republicans.