South Dakota is one of four states that has never permitted write-in voting. This year, there is so much interest in write-in voting, especially for President, that South Dakota Secretary of State Shantel Krebs felt compelled to say, in a speech on October 10, that South Dakota doesn’t permit write-ins. See this story.

The reason South Dakota doesn’t permit write-ins is that the 1891 legislative session, which passed a bill for government-printed ballots, wrote the law to bar write-ins. Back in the 1890’s and 1900’s decades, when state legislatures did that, state courts almost always ruled that ballots without write-in space are unconstitutional. Every state supreme court that considered the question, from the beginning of government-printed ballots in 1889, through 1989, always upheld write-in space, with the single exception of the South Dakota Supreme Court. State Supreme Courts in 20 states threw out write-in bans.

In 1901, a voter sued the Secretary of State of South Dakota over the write-in ban. Back then the South Dakota Supreme Court only had three members, and for that case, one of the three justices was unable to participate in the write-in case, Chamberlin v Wood, 88 NW 109. So only two members of the court heard the case, and they disagreed with each other. One justice voted to uphold the ban on write-ins, and the other voted to strike it down. On a tie, the statute survived.

The other states that never permitted write-in voting throughout history are Nevada, Hawaii, and Oklahoma. Louisiana permitted write-ins until the top-two system passed in 1975. Although Louisiana no longer uses top-two, it has never restored write-ins.