South Dakota Attorney General Opinions
Free plain-English summaries of attorney general opinions issued in South Dakota, with full citations and the original source on every page.
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Under South Dakota's 2025 HB 1130, do counties, cities, and school districts have to hold their elections on a single combined ballot, or can each level run its own ballot on the same day?
They can run separate ballots. HB 1130 only requires the elections to happen on the same date (June primary or November general), not that they share one ballot. 'In conjunction with' is about timing;…
Can a South Dakota city with a home rule charter, like Sioux Falls, switch its municipal elections to ranked choice voting or approval voting instead of a traditional one-vote-per-person plurality system?
Approval voting yes, ranked choice voting no. Chief Deputy McGuigan concluded that approval voting, where voters can mark approval of multiple candidates, fits within SDCL 9-13-25's framework (a runof…
After SD enacted SDCL 12-19-1.2 in 2013 requiring 46 days of absentee voting, does that 46-day rule apply to municipal (city) elections, or do the smaller 15-day and 7-day periods in SDCL 9-13-21 still control for municipal absentee voting?
The 15-day rule (and 7-day rule for runoff secondary elections) in SDCL 9-13-21 continues to control for SD municipal elections. SDCL 12-1-2 expressly says Title 12 election provisions yield to statut…
A candidate for Aberdeen mayor had lived in Aberdeen for 25 years total, but had spent about two years living and registered to vote in Sioux Falls before moving back. The statute said a city commissioner must have been 'a resident of the city for at least two years prior to his election.' Did the two-year residency have to come immediately before the election, or could it have been at any earlier time in the candidate's life?
It had to be immediately before the election. The AG ruled that reading the statute to allow any two-year residency from any point in the candidate's past would lead to absurd results (a person who li…
Do the people who work the polls at a city election (the 'judges' and 'clerks' of the election) get paid for their time? If so, who actually pays them, the city or the county?
Yes, they are paid, and the city pays. South Dakota's specific municipal election statutes did not fix a compensation rate, but the general election laws (which the municipal statutes incorporated by …
If a municipal election needed a runoff (a 'secondary' election between the top two candidates) because no candidate won a majority, could a voter who would not be in town on Election Day cast an absentee ballot in the runoff?
Yes. Secondary municipal elections in South Dakota were conducted in the same manner as the regular municipal election, and the general election laws (which already permitted absentee voting in regula…
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Attorney general opinions in South Dakota are written by the South Dakota Attorney General's office in response to questions from state agencies, legislators, and prosecutors. They are not binding like court decisions, but courts and agencies treat them as persuasive guidance on how state law applies. Every opinion above has a plain-English question and short answer, plus a link to the full original text.