NOBODY ASKED ME, but… I wanted to tell readers about what was said during the public comment portion of the last Minnehaha County Commission meeting on June 11.
While the meeting itself was uneventful with only three commissioners present, Tom Lawrence with sdvoice.org, spoke to those remaining about the petitions being circulated to challenges one of the South Dakota legislature’s latest attempts to thumb their noses at the people who elected them, HB 1094.
While the bill’s prime sponsor, Jon Hansen a Republican attorney from Dell Rapids, has been quoted in the media as saying that this bill is to combat the “out-of- state petition circulators who are trying to bring their California and Massachusetts liberal agendas to South Dakota.”
Let me tell you why I believe Hansen’s quote to be hogwash, there are several reasons.
- Those damned liberals from Massachusetts and California are not wasting the time, money or effort flooding deep-red South Dakota to bring their “agenda” to a place where it won’t fly, anyway.
- Any out-of-state groups, conservative or liberal, that have money to throw behind bringing their “agenda” anywhere, is certainly going to have the money and logistical support to circumvent what is in HB 1094, but the local-grass roots in-state petitioners will not, and finally,
- There are just as many conservative groups that want their agenda in the state, but all they have to do now is throw their attentions and/or payola the way of the supermajority of Republicans, like Hansen, in the state legislature.
Which brings me to IM 22 which was passed by SD voters in 2016.
The purpose of IM 22 was to tighten campaign finance laws, ethics laws and increase transparency, which people in supermajorities like to avoid.
However, our legislators came back in January of 2017, and had IM 22 repealed.
Hanson, who served in the legislature from 2011 to 2013, resigned his seat and wasn’t serving at the time, but since he got back into the SD House of Representative in 2018, one has to wonder if HB 1094 wasn’t his way to stress that whatever the legislature wants to do, they can do, because they seem to think they know more than the voters.
But, I am sure readers are wondering exactly what HB 1094 does, and how it affects those grass-roots petition drives.
Getting back to Tom Lawrence at the county commission meeting, according to information he had (and what I saw in the text of the bill), HB 1094 makes it very difficult for people to circulate petitions.
People doing that have to enter a state registry and include all sorts of personal information.
Whether or not this was intended to make it easier for members of the supermajority to keep track their opposition, I don’t know, but in a 1984–Big Brother sort of way, it could be used for that.
People circulating petitions would have to wear state-issued badges that identify them as petition circulators. (Funny, I always thought the person walking up to me with all the clipboards was already identified.)
As I referred to earlier, those “liberal agenda people from Massachusetts and California” would have no concern about what the South Dakota legislature can or can’t do, but the people who have lived in South Dakota their entire lives, like Cory Heidelberger, the head of sdvoice.org.
There is a myriad of other regulations which circulators have to adhere to in HB 1094. And making the slightest error in regard to these will result in signatures being thrown out.
For example, the bill calls for the Secretary of State to determine a font size (size of type), which, as long as the SoS is part of the “in crowd” of the supermajority, could change from petition to petition, making it easier for mistakes to be made.
In fact, if a definite font size is set, and petitions are photocopied, there is a good chance that the font size on the copies is going to be slightly less than prescribed by the new law, making it much easier to challenge those petitions and have signatures thrown out, as the HB 1094 details.
But remember, the people with the all of that out-of-state money from Massachusetts and California would not make any mistakes in dealing with this.
Such as, let’s say, Chuck Brennan who recently spent lots of cash to try and save his payday loan business.
The people, such as the attorneys making money off Brennan, would have no trouble getting through all of the circulating red tape to do what he wanted.
It is your neighbors –those longtime South Dakota citizens– circulating ballot petitions who are the ones likely to be caught in this game for lawyers.
Keep in mind, the whole concept of ballot initiatives and referendums started in South Dakota in 1908.
I doubt that many current members of our state legislature know this, or even care about our state’s history.
The people of South Dakota have always had a strong independent streak, and HB 1094 is seemingly trying to take this away.
But as Lawrence said, they only have until June 27 to submit their petitions, so if registered South Dakota voters want to learn how to sign a petition send them a message at http://sdvoice.org/index.php/contact.
Agree? Disagree? Want to get something off your chest? Email me at and let me know your thoughts and opinions.
