South Dakota: My op-ed on the curious case of South Dakota, direct democracy pioneer but rarely using recalls

Here's my op-ed on the curious case of South Dakota. Despite the fact that it was the first direct democracy state (adopting the initiative in 1898), it has barely used recalls: 

South Dakotans rarely target local officials with a recall. There is no central database of recalls in the state, but over 12 years of keeping track of recalls nationwide, there seems to have been only one elected official who faced an actual vote over the last 12 years — Whitewood Mayor Deb Schmidt, who easily survived the vote in 2011. Additionally, one other official, Trent President Bob Dickey, resigned in 2018 after recall petitions were taken out and signature collection started.

The state has had some close calls during this time. In 2015, a recall against Hartford’s mayor was kept from the ballot by the refusal of the city council to schedule an election after signatures were verified. The mayor eventually resigned, but the Legislature began looking into possible changes to the law to remove the scheduling power from city councils. In 2016, a recall in Rapid City failed after 1,700 signatures were tossed out because the court found that the petitioners hired out-of-state signature gatherers.

In 2011, petitioners seemingly handed in enough signatures for the recall of Huron’s mayor, but the effort failed as a good number of signatures were declared invalid (not an uncommon occurrence).

Other than those notable efforts, there were only a handful of recall threats that even made the newspapers over the years.

For the last time a recall seems to have succeeded in actually removing an official we would have to go back to Yankton in 2007, where the mayor and a city commissioner were kicked out of office.

It may not be fair to compare the state to the largest states that regularly see recalls take place, like California, Michigan, Oregon or Wisconsin. But even among the smaller population states, South Dakota stands out for this fairly paltry total. As a comparison, North Dakota has held 33 recall votes in the last 12 years, with 22 officials removed, 11 surviving recall votes and two officials resigning. Nebraska has had 43 recalls.

It is not clear what explains this discrepancy or why South Dakota never adopted the recall on the statewide level. Looking at the history, it does not appear that voters ever got an initiative on the ballot that would have expanded the right of recall to state-level officials. In 1913, the Legislature did apparently consider a recall law, though that did not advance to the ballot. In 2021, a group called “South Dakota Voters for the Right to Recall” was certified by the Secretary of State’s Office to start collecting signatures for an initiative. However, the effort seems to have died out without much notice. There was also a bill during the most recent legislative session to allow recalls for school board members, but it failed. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, school board members have been a popular target of recalls nationwide.