Status quo prevails as South Dakota voters shoot down handful of ballot proposals
Amendment F sneaks through despite late rush of opposition spending
South Dakotans will continue to pay taxes on groceries, be prevented from buying cannabis legally, and will keep gender neutral language out of their state Constitution.
When the dust settled, the state’s electorate only gave approval to one ballot initiative, one presented to them by the state Legislature. Amendment F, which was the only ballot measure to maintain a winning margin throughout the night, will allow the Legislature to consider a work requirement for Medicaid should a future presidential administration allow them to do so. It prevailed despite a late flood of money intended to derail support. It passed 56 to 44 percent.
Other measures didn’t find the same success. Amendment E, IM 28, and IM 29 ran behind through the night - unable to gain any footing as totals began to be reported in the state’s largest counties.
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That was particularly true of Initiated Measure 28, pushed by Dakotans for Health. It would have repealed the state’s sales tax on groceries. Proponents argued the tax relief would ease the burden on low-income families facing rising costs. However, opponents claimed the repeal would undercut funding for vital state programs, a concern that ultimately prevailed. It was trounced by a decisive margin, reminiscent of a measure aiming to do the same thing in 2004.
IM 28 was losing by roughly 70 percent to 30 percent as of time of publication.
The opposition, led by Vote No on South Dakota Income Tax, says they felt polling conducted by local media outlets overstated support for the measure. Still, they were surprised by the nearly 40 percent margin that persisted through election night.
“We said from the beginning this was poorly drafted and was going to have major unintended consequences,” said Nathan Sanderson, leader of the IM 28 opposition. “Voters understood that, and they rejected it.”
Amendment E, which aimed to update South Dakota’s state Constitution with gender-neutral wording, failed as well. Advocates for the amendment, which included Gov. Kristi Noem, the state’s first female governor, said the change would make the Constitution more inclusive, ensuring it accurately represents all South Dakotans. But, voters ultimately expressed reluctance to alter the language in the state’s founding document.
Amendment E was losing 59 percent to 41 percent at press time.
Finally, IM 29, the measure to legalize recreational marijuana, faced strong opposition outside of the state’s largest population by county, and was rejected. The measure’s failure signals South Dakotans’ ongoing wariness toward recreational cannabis, despite widespread legalization in other states. Concerns over public safety, youth access, and potential strain on law enforcement outweighed the potential tax revenue and regulatory benefits that proponents promised. It’s the second time that voters have rejected legalized cannabis - having first done so in 2022. A measure that would have done something similar passed in 2020, but was overturned in a legal challenge in the state Supreme Court.
At time of publication, IM 29 was losing 56 percent to 44 percent.
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What a great outcome for South Dakota! We are preserving the majority of our state’s values!
Hmmm, what are the state's values? The only ballot measure that passed (we didn’t even agree that gender neutral language in the state’s constitution was a good thing— it’s a man’s world little girl!) was to put in place a work requirement for medicaid recipients—the poorest of the poor (a family of four can’t make more than $43,056, a little over $10,000 a year per person—$27 dollars a day to cover all your living expenses, housing, food, transportation, health care, insurance), pregnant women, newborns, children, the disabled, the blind . . . if they are able-bodied (who cares if they are mentally ill), get to work!
Nothing worse than these free loaders living the high life with free medical care! We cannot afford these entitlements—we of course can afford to cut the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%. We have to do everything we can to reduce the onerous burden on corporations or they won’t continue to provide these able-bodied medicaid recipients with such good minimum wage jobs! They’ll go belly up! We must save them! Okay, though I know facts don’t matter; let me close with a few facts.
America’s largest, most consistently profitable corporations saw their effective tax rates fall from an average of 22.0 percent to an average of 12.8 percent after the Trump tax law went into effect in 2018. The effective tax rate is important, because though the corporate tax rate is 21%, most corporations pay far less.
The 296 largest and most consistently profitable U.S. corporations paid $240 billion less in taxes from 2018 to 2021 than if they had continued to pay the effective rates they’d paid before the Trump tax law.
While profits for the largest, continuously profitable U.S. corporations rose by 44 percent after passage of the Trump tax law, their federal tax bills dropped by 16 percent (just think if their taxes had remained the same, they might have had profits of only 28% over the same time period—a disaster).
The number of these corporations paying tax rates of less than 10 percent increased from 56 to 95 after the Trump tax law went into effect.
Many of the largest and most well-known corporations in the country — including Walmart, Verizon, Disney, and Meta — among the most able to pay taxes had the largest tax reductions after the Trump tax law went into effect.
Is it any wonder that these corporations poured money into electing politicians who support continuing and expanding these tax cuts?