John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight – The South Dakota Senate voted Tuesday to repeal a 30-day residency requirement for voter registration that became law last year.
Sen. David Wheeler, R-Huron, carried the secretary of state-supported Senate Bill 17 to the floor. The 30-day requirement passed last year in response to voter registrations by RV owners from other states who purchase a mailbox in South Dakota.
Wheeler told senators the law won’t withstand legal scrutiny. He cited several U.S. Supreme Court cases, and pointed to a section of the federal Voting Rights Act specifically prohibiting durational residency requirements.
“We’ve basically rolled back the statutes to what they were last year,” Wheeler said of the language in the new bill. “We don’t need to be dealing with lawsuits in the middle of a presidential election year.”
South Dakota requires voters to register at least 15 days before an election. The 30-day rule was different, though. It required that voters attest, under penalty of perjury, that they’d lived in South Dakota for at least 30 days in the year leading up to an election.
Minnehaha County Auditor Leah Anderson told South Dakota Searchlight last year that her office lacked the resources to enforce the durational rule. Pennington County Auditor Cindy Mohler, meanwhile, said her office had been sending letters to voters who listed rented mailboxes as their residence to ask for their physical address.
During meetings on electoral rules last summer, Anderson asked the Secretary of State’s Office for guidance on the issue.
The office’s original version of SB 17 did not address enforcement, though. Instead, it would have required citizens to attest that they’d lived in South Dakota for 30 consecutive days immediately prior to registering.
After hearing the legal concerns about that bill, Wheeler said, the Secretary of State’s Office chose to support his amendment, which rewrote the bill to remove the 30-day requirement.
As amended, SB 17 passed 31-2. The bill now goes to a committee of the House of Representatives.
This is the second time in modern history that lawmakers have passed and then had second thoughts about a 30-day residency requirement for voter registration.
Twenty-one years ago, lawmakers passed a similar bill. The next year, on advice from then-Secretary of State Chris Nelson, who described the bill as unenforceable, legislators repealed it.