Sioux Falls City Clerk Lorie Hogstad has finished her standard petition review on Save Our Neighborhood's petition to refer to a public vote a key rezoning decision that allowed Walmart to move forward with a planned Supercenter at the corner of 85th St. and Minnesota Ave. in Sioux Falls. She finds that "a sufficient number of qualified electors have signed the Petition" [Lorie Hogstad, Letter "Re: Referendum Petition on Ordinance No. 49-13," 2013/09/27].
The random-sample verification process estimates that 86.77% of the signatures are valid, meaning they are from registered voters living within Sioux Falls city limits. With 6,362 signatures turned in, that estimate would indicate 5,642 valid signatures, nearly 600 more than the 5,089 needed for a successful petition. Given the complexities of signature collection, a validity rate north of 85% seems a pretty solid outcome for Save Our Neighborhood.
Hogstad's review, however, does not directly respond to the 2,084 specific points of dispute outlined in an affidavit filed September 9 challenging the petition. Hogstad says in a new release today that she expects the additional review to take another 3-4 weeks.
The affidavit was signed by Margaret Nelson and has the support of Walmart and of the current owners of the land in question, the Homan family, who said at the time of the filing:
We have reviewed the signatures seeking to undo the City Council’s recent approval decision and believe that this effort has fallen short of the minimum requirements needed to make the zoning of our land a ballot initiative. We hope that this will enable the Sioux Falls community and our family to finally move on and ensure people in Sioux Falls have the options they both want and deserve [Homan family statement, cited by Jon Walker, "Walmart disputes 2,084 signatures in petition; family that owns land issues statement," That Sioux Falls Paper, 2013/09/10].
The result of the City Clerk's Office's next month or so of work may give us an interesting opportunity to confirm (or perhaps challenge) the validity of the random-sample verification process for petitions. If the formal challenge, which requires Hogstad and her staff to provide a specific written response to each challenged petition and/or signature, turns out differently from this initial review, it would call into question whether the standard approach to verifying petitions sufficiently upholds the regulations about how we put things on the ballot in South Dakota.
Interesting! When is the last time we had a specific challenge on a petition of this size? Has random sampling ever been shown to fall short on previous petitions?
Cory, I don't remember one, but I also don't remember a situation in the past where a major corporation contested our State's petition process either... to this level.
Also, on face value it seems to me that the 5% rule already doesn't pass muster. Let us say you need 5000 signatures to get on the ballot and you hand-in 5003 signatures, and four of the signatures are bogus. The odds in your favor as petitioner are quite good that all four of the bogus signatures will be found within the unquestioned 95% of the signatures, thus qualifying you for the ballot. Although, technically you should not be placed on the ballot.
The question I am wondering is what is the definition of "a sufficient number of qualified electors have signed the petition." Does that mean that voter, John Doe, at 1000 S. Main Ave., is a verified registered voter, or does it mean that he is not only a registered voter at that address, but that he also signed in the right box (not the print box) and that he put Sioux Falls and Minnehaha in the right boxes, that the signatures match, that there is not a consistency of hand-writing throughout the given petition (although, I believe a petitioner can legally fill-out all of the boxes for the signer except
the signature one), and does the signature qualify the alleged voter's name on the voter registry or/and his previous signature at the time of his registration?
Since, a City Clerk does not have direct access to the original signatures of the registered voters (or do they?) how can a City Clerk claim a presumption of legitimacy for a petition drive. Unless they are only looking at the names and the address, which in that case, means that the 5% rule is only germane to the question of whether these voters exist and not to whether they personally intended to support a particular petition drive, which I thought was the whole purpose of our petition process to begin with......
I also thought that City Clerk, Hogstad, in her press release today used some rather dubious terminology when she claimed "that the sample contains 282 valid signatures as defined by South Dakota law and the Administrative Rules of South Dakota." Especially, If you care to check the fact that there is no specific law in South Dakota on how to judge a petition signature and without such a law, how could there be a germane administrative rule or rules?
The petition verification process is to validate the signer is a resident of Sioux Falls. The signer is putting their signature on the paper using the honor system. The system can go back to the signer at the address given to verify data if necessary.
The address given only says where they are living in Sioux Falls because the registration follows the person if they move.
So she should have said 282 appeared to be valid signers because they are on the voter rolls. She is using the legal wording not our spoken wording. Our form of government is supposed to run on the honor system.
The larger issue now is the statewide purge of 64,000 registered voters now being conducted and how it will effect the petition drives. Guess who its designed to hurt?
Winston, great questions; maybe ones we should ask Clerk Hogstad! The way I understood her statement, what she verified was the validity of individual signatures (her statement talks a lot about the "signature lines" and the sample sizes needed based on completed signature lines). Because Hogstad talks pretty exclusively about individual signatories, I DON'T get the impression that her initial required-by-law double-check checked for the sort of petition distributor or other systemic collection issues (notarization, filled out boxes, etc.) that are at least a portion of the disputing affidavit.
I, like you, am at least a little bit uneasy at the 5% approach to verification, but I can also see how requiring every single thing be looked at might place undue burden on the petition collectors and/or unfairly stack the deck against petitioners generally--having a sort of "chilling effect" on petitioners if it's perceived that they're presumed inept until proven correct (as opposed to the sort of honor system approach Testor15 describes pretty accurately as our current philophy).