Pillar C · Foundations
Elections and Voting Integrity
“Every legal vote counts. Every illegal vote cancels one that should.”
Proof of citizenship to register. Strong photo ID. Tight chain-of-custody on absentee. End mail-forwarding residency abuse. Stop out-of-state money from rewriting our constitution by ballot.
Where I stand
- Proof of citizenship to register to vote in South Dakota.
- Photo ID and verified chain-of-custody for absentee/mail-in ballots.
- Real residency requirements. End mail-forwarding abuse.
- Geographic signature distribution for initiated measures.
- Higher thresholds for constitutional amendments.
Pushback, answered
The hard questions, answered straight.
These are the real objections this position gets, with the same answers Zac gives in person. No talking points. No dodges.
“Fraud is rare here. This is a solution in search of a problem.”
I want it to stay rare, and I want you to be able to prove that to your most skeptical neighbor. Safeguards are not an accusation. You lock your truck on a good street and you put a smoke alarm in a house that has never burned. Rare also is not a synonym for harmless: a bill just died in the House by one vote, and at that margin a handful of illegal ballots is not a rounding error, it is the result.
“Proof of citizenship and photo ID will keep legal voters from voting.”
I take that seriously, because the first half of my principle is that every legal vote counts, and I mean both halves or neither. You already show photo ID to board a plane, open a bank account, and pick up certain prescriptions, and voting decides who governs all of it. When a legal South Dakota voter is missing a document, the answer is helping that voter get the document rather than lowering the standard for the whole state. Simple for citizens, closed to everybody else.
“You want to gut absentee voting.”
No. Absentee voting stays. Your grandmother votes, the rancher hauling cattle votes, the college kid studying out of state votes. My position is that the ballot which travels should meet the same standard as the ballot cast in person: photo ID with the application, and a verified chain of custody from request to count. That is a receipt, not a barrier, and you should be able to confirm your ballot made the whole trip.
“Residency rules punish people who live on the road and legally claim South Dakota.”
Most of them follow the rules exactly as written and my quarrel is not with travelers. It is with a system that lets a mail slot stand in for a home. The people who live under South Dakota's laws should be the ones choosing who writes them. If this state is genuinely your home, a real residency standard costs you nothing.
“South Dakota pioneered the citizen initiative and you are taking it away.”
South Dakota was the first state to put the initiative in citizens' hands and I want it to stay a citizens' tool, which is exactly why it needs guardrails. Geographic distribution means an idea has to find support across this state before it reaches your ballot instead of renting signatures from paid crews in two cities. A higher bar for constitutional amendments means out-of-state donors do not write their experiments into our founding document on a bare majority. It does make ballot campaigns work harder, and that is the intent.