On February 4, the South Dakota Senate amended SB 69, the ballot access restriction bill, to make the bill even more restrictive. The Senate then passed the bill on a party-line vote, with all the “No” votes coming from Democrats. The bill passed 25-8.

The bill now injures ballot access three ways: (1) it moves the deadline for a newly-qualifying party from March to February; (2) it says members of qualified parties cannot sign an independent candidate’s petition (although it does lower the number of signatures for an independent candidate); (3) the new amendment vastly increases the difficulty for a member of a newly-qualifying party to get on his or her own party’s primary ballot.

The new part of the bill, described in (3) above, raises the number of signatures for the member of a newly-qualifying party to get on his or her own party’s primary ballot for statewide office from 250 signatures to 1% of all the registered voters in the state who are not members of qualified parties. There are currently 106,567 voters in South Dakota who are not members of a qualified party, so the primary petition would rise from 250 to 1,066. Yet, the bill continues the current restriction that says independent voters can’t sign a primary petition! It is utterly illogical to say that a Libertarian trying to get on the Libertarian primary ballot needs a number of signatures equal to 1% of the number of independent voters, and yet independent voters can’t sign that petition.

Not only that, but the person who wrote the latest amendment does not seem to know that the number of signatures for primary petitions of newly-qualifying parties is already in section 12-5-1.4. The bill does not amend 12-5-1.4. Yet the bill expands 12-6-7 so that it is also a law on how many signatures are needed for the primary petitions of newly-qualifying parties. The new 12-6-7 (requiring 1,066 signatures of party members) thus contradicts the old, unamended 12-5-1.4 (which requires 250).