By Dave Baumeister, County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS – For the second week in a row, voting issues were at the forefront at the Minnehaha County Commission meeting on Tuesday, April 26.
During his briefing the week before, Auditor Ben Kyte spoke about the various duties of his office, but questions from commissioners mainly focused on what had been brought up during public comment at recent meetings.
As Commission Chairperson Cindy Heiberger explained, public comment is a time for just that – comments from the public on non-agenda items.
She said during that time, commissioners don’t ask or answer questions or otherwise get involved in people’s comments.
But as happened on April 19, commissioners did ask Kyte specifically about many of the issues people who questioned voting practices had asked about.
At least one member of that South Dakota Canvasing Group had been present earlier in the meeting, but she left sometime after public comment and before Kyte’s briefing.
At the most recent meeting, seven people referred to what Kyte said, and it seemed to be implied they had no idea he was going to be talking about elections, even though it was on the agenda, and there was a 10-page PowerPoint presentation, of which seven dealt specifically with elections, one of the main functions of the auditor’s office.
Both the agenda and the PowerPoint had been posted on the Minnehaha County website four days prior to the April 19 meeting.
While they weren’t in attendance, it seemed clear that the people who spoke had watched the meeting online, on TV, and/or read about what happened, as they referred to several of the comments made.
Two of the comments almost every speaker referred to were in reference to what Kyte and Commissioner Jeff Barth said on hand-counting ballots.
On that subject, Kyte said, “Humans can’t focus that well,” and Barth asked, “Do we really think it would be better to bring bozos from off the street…to count ballots?”
But those comments came in the context of mistakes that could be made counting 2.5 million ballot-items, as well as having to find the huge number of workers necessary to count them in a short window of time.
Their comments didn’t seem to be directed at any specific group.
Once more on CO2
What was expected to be the major issue in the meeting turned out to be very short.
Once again, commissioners revisited their position on the Summit Carbon Solutions carbon dioxide pipeline, as they learned the PUC added a two-week period to become a “party” to the issue.
On April 5, the commission decided not to seek party status, and they re-stated that same plan at the April 26 meeting.
Commissioner Dean Karsky quoted material from the PUC which stated, “You only need to apply for party status if you want to participate formally in the docket by putting on actual testimony or other factual evidence, conducting discovery, cross-examining witnesses, making legal arguments and to preserve your rights to appeal to the courts if you do not believe the (PUC) Commission’s decision is legally correct.”
He said that he didn’t see how the county would get involved in any of those details, so he didn’t see any reason to seek party status.
Only one person added his thoughts against the pipeline process, and the commission took no other action on the matter.
Clothing faux pas
One of the people who spoke on the voting issue earlier in the meeting wore a “Trump” campaign hat when he came up to speak and was told by Heiberger that he had to remove the hat and should not wear it in the building, which he readily removed for the duration of his attendance at the meeting.
South Dakota state law prohibits campaigning, whether it is with clothing, signs, or in other ways within 100 feet of a polling place.
As the Minnehaha County Administration Building is currently a polling place for absentee voting, campaigning in any way within the building is illegal.
Karsky pointed out this is an easy law to forget and recalled his first run at re-election when he parked outside the building with a “Vote for Me” magnetic sign on his car.
He said that the auditor at that time removed it. Karsky said he felt embarrassed but learned his lesson.
The next meeting of the county commission will be at 9 a.m. on May 3 on the second floor of the Minnehaha County Administration Building.
