Following our poorly attended municipal and school board election in April, I discovered that Madison's registered voter numbers are inflated by over 1100 voters who don't really live in Madison. Local business MyDakotaAddress.com makes money providing mailbox services to recreational vehicle owners who register their vehicles in South Dakota to avoid taxes in their home states.
These legally tax-dodging travelers swell the city's voter registration by 25% over our "natural" resident voter count of 4470. When I discovered these numbers, it occurred to me that these registered non-resident voters have little stake in whether we maintain our schools and roads; they have little reason to care about Madison or South Dakota politics beyond keeping our taxes and fees low. Such a large disengaged bloc of voters is unhealthy for democracy.
These RV voters impair our local democratic processes in another way. Suppose someone in Madison wants to initiate or refer a city ordinance. Suppose some concerned citizens decide to impose strict reporting requirements and performance standards for all recipients of taxpayers subsidies. Suppose some downtown organizers decide to push a public vote to repeal city funding for the Chamber of Commerce and LAIC and direct those $309,000 to a concerted downtown revitalization program.
To put a local initiative or referendum on the ballot, petitioners must obtain signatures from five percent of registered voters in their municipality. April's voter rolls indicate Madison petitioners would have to get 280 signatures to call a public vote. But that's five percent of 5593 registered voters, which includes 1123 RVers who are almost never in town. If petitioners only had to get signatures from 5% of resident voters, they would need only 224 signatures.
Allowing RVers to swell the voter rolls thus hinders the ability of local residents to initiate and refer local ordinances. We are partially disenfranchised by people who don't live here.
We could fix this problem with a simple amendment of SDCL 9-20-1, the statute authorizing local initiatives and referenda. We could insert the word "resident" before "registered voters." To enact that, though, we would have to require the county auditor to somehow verify that a registered voter doesn't really live at the address that voter provides. Of course, in Madison, if your voting address is 110 East Center, we know you don't live here... but we might need some more specific statutory language to guide local election officials in striking certain addresses from the "resident registered voter" count.
A simpler fix might be to change the initiative and referendum petition standard to that used for primary elections. To get on the primary ballot, candidates must obtain signatures from a number of voters equal to one percent of those in their district who voted for their party's candidate in the last gubernatorial election.
*****Update 11:18 CDT: The great news that South Dakotans have successfully referred House Bill 1230 to a public vote in 2012 reminds me that statewide initiative and referendum petitions base signature requirements on votes cast for governor in the last election, not on total number of registered voters.*****
We could change the local initiative/referendum standard to signatures from 20% of local folks who voted in the last election. Given April's low turnout, a 15% requirement would put the signatures needed here in Madison around 230... roughly the same number petitioners would need under current statute if we weren't counting RVers who aren't here to help put measures on the ballot.
We should all have the freedom to live and travel where we wish. No one should lose the right to vote simply for choosing an itinerant lifestyle. But we should change our rules on local initiatives and referenda to keep non-residents from hampering the exercise of local democratic rights.
These patriotic voters are helping democrats candidates in their home state by voting here. They are also hurting the schools revenue where their grandkids go to school. Their only thought is that they want to vote for a winning republican and save a few dollars on their own taxes. They vote for a republican that would have won anyways. But they can drive around the world with a smile on their faces. They have done virutally no good, and have done harm in many areas by being dishonest about where they live to save themselves a dollar. If we would have RV sales tax the same as everything else we would help our own revenues without even costing our own people and make taxes the same for everyone at the same time.