On March 5, the South Dakota Senate State Affairs Committee passed HB 1286. It makes some ballot access improvements but also throws some new impediments into the process.

It moves the non-presidential independent candidate petition deadline from April to June (the presidential independent petition deadline is not affected and continues to be in August). It lowers the number of signatures to qualify a new party from 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote, to 1% of the last gubernatorial vote. It moves the party petition deadline from March to July. Those, of course, are all liberalizing changes.

Unfortunately, it appears to require smaller qualified parties (who nominate by convention, not primary) to submit difficult candidate petitions. This part of the bill has no logic. Under the old law, minor party candidates for Governor and Congress needed a petition of 250 signatures to get themselves on the primary ballot. Because minor parties in South Dakota have very few registered members, this 250-signature petition in reality proved almost impossible to satisfy. For example, the Libertarian Party hasn’t completed this petition since 1994 (during the years 1996-2006, the required number for Libertarians was much smaller, generally about 50 signatures). HB 1286 keeps these petition requirements in place, even though there is no logical reason for them. The old law’s petition requirements for primary candidates at least was logical, even if too difficult; the requirement was to keep the primary ballot from being too crowded. But now that there is no more primary ballot for the small qualified parties, there is no rationale for such petitions. See this story.