U.S. DISTRICT COURT STRIKES DOWN SOUTH DAKOTA FEBRUARY PETITION DEADLINE FOR INITIATIVES

On August 29, U.S. District Court Judge Camela C. Theeler, a Biden appointee, struck down South Dakota’s petition deadline for initiative petitions.  Dakotans for Health v Johnson, 4:25cv-4050.  The deadline is the first Tuesday in February, which is approximately nine months before the election.

The rationale is that petitioning is free speech activity, and the deadline effectively “bans petition circulation for the nine months before an election.”  That means the state was banning the type of expressive activity that petitioning represents for a very lengthy period.

The decision is based on a pair of U. S. Supreme Court decisions.  Meyer v Grant in 1988 had struck down Colorado’s ban on paying petitioners, and Buckley v American Constitutional Law Foundation in 1999 struck down a Colorado law that said petitioners had to be registered voters.  Both decisions said that petitioning for initiatives is free speech activity, something that had not previously been settled by the Supreme Court.

The recent South Dakota decision is also based on a 2023 Eighth Circuit decision that struck down South Dakota’s petition deadline for initiative petitions of November of the year before the election.  That case was SD Voice v Noem, 60 F.4^th 1071.

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On October 17, a Virginia state court refused to remove a Democratic legislative nominee from the Virginia general election ballot. See this story. The lawsuit had been filed by voters who argued that the candidate doesn’t really live in the district in which she is running. See this story.

On October 22, the North Carolina House passed SB 249, the bill to alter the boundaries of two U.S. House districts. The vote was 66-48. The bill had passed the Senate the day before.

North Carolina doesn’t have the referendum, so there is nothing voters can do to stop the bill from taking effect.