Lawrence County Commission refused to certify ballot initiative to rid county of electronic voting tabulators
DEADWOOD, S.D. – An effort to force Lawrence County to count election ballots by hand and rid the county of electronic machines was turned away Friday, Jan.10, 2025 by a circuit court judge.
Nichole Braithwait had filed suit against the Lawrence County Commission and its commissioners after they failed to certify a petition drive that would have put the issue to a public vote. Braithwait wanted to eliminate the county’s use of electronic voting machines and electronic vote tabulators, which would require election results to be based off of hand-counted tallies.
Braithwait submitted a petition to the Lawrence County auditor with about 1,300 signatures to put the issue to voters. But the Lawrence County Commission refused to certify the issue for the ballot, reckoning that it was prohibited by law from certifying an issue that it couldn’t legally decide on its own.
The proposed ordinance required Lawrence County to use paper ballots – the state already uses paper ballots – and it forbade “electronic devices, of any kind” to be used in elections. The proposed measure also prohibited the use of vote centers – the practice of taking local voting precincts and centralizing them into fewer voting centers.
“If the petition’s item one is meant to require ballots to be on paper, ballots in South Dakota are already required to be on paper,” the commission argued.
Braithwait’s initial case was dismissed in June. She then filed a writ of mandamus to force the issue on the ballot.
But Judge Eric Kelderman rejected the request, reasoning that the concept of res judicata applied to the request for a writ of mandamus because the issue had already been adjudicated in the previous lawsuit.
“The petitioner’s two legal actions cover the same alleged ‘wrong,’” argued Sara Frankenstein, a lawyer for the Lawrence County Commission. “The final disposition of the earlier case requires immediate dismissal of the latter.”
Lawrence County also argued that the petition violated state and federal election laws, another reason why it couldn’t certify the measure to voters there.
“The first item on the petition states: ‘All elections in Lawrence County shall be conducted by paper ballot only.’ This item can be interpreted in two ways. Either the ballots must be on physical paper (not electronic), or the ballots must be ‘paper ballots’ as described by state law and not ‘optical scan ballots. Under either interpretation, petition item one is void or conflicts with state law,” the county argued.
Frankenstein is a partner with Gunderson, Palmer, Nelson & Ashmore in Rapid City.
