South Dakota smoking ban fight
Published on August 18, 2009 5:02 AM
The legal case filed by South Dakota comprehensive smoking ban opponents would be centered on whether technical mistakes had enough importance to reject a major part of almost 25,000 signatures on the petition requesting bringing the ban implementation in the ballot for the 2010 statewide vote.
The coalition of ban opponents representing the owners of eating and gambling venues managed to collect enough signatures to pass the ban to next years elections, however, the Secretary of State’s office turned down the petition stating that the majority of them were invalid. The petition lacked 221 valid signatures to be submitted to the vote, Chris Nelson declared.
Nevertheless, the opponents of the ordinance didn’t give up and decided to file a lawsuit against the Secretary of State, claiming that minor technical mistakes should not prevent the ban from being passed to the public vote.
Back in spring South Dakota general assembly approved the legislation smoking in bars, restaurants, casino floors and video poker venues. The law, which would have been regarded as an amendment to the State Indoor Clean Air Act, that banned smoking in the majority of public places in 2002, was to come into force on July, 1st 2009.
However, the owners of the venues subjected to smoking ban teamed up into a coalition and managed to collect more than 25,000 signatures, and submitted them to the Secretary of State on June 22. The petition called for passing the ban to the ballot for the referendum that would grant them a delay in the implementation of the ban until the public vote takes place in November 2010.
The Secretary of State Chris Nelson initially examined randomly selected 5 % of the signatures and admitted that the coalition managed to collect enough valid signatures to pass the ban to the public vote.
But, the supporters of the ban contested numerous signatures, so Chris Nelson then declared that 8,845 signatures were not valid, making the opponents 221 signatures short of the required amount.
According to the coalition, Nelson turned down more than two thousand of signatures due to technical mistakes by public notaries who failed to put the correct date of expiration of their commissions.
Sara Frankenstein, the coalition’s lawyer said that the notaries have given all the information to be reached by anyone who wants to clarify whether the signature was valid or not.
Chris Nelson admitted that he only takes into consideration the legislation and regulations stipulated in the state constitution. He said that similar cases in the past were decided in the court as well because only judge can decide whether the signatures complied with the norms enough to declare them valid.
According to the South Dakota legislation, individuals that spread petitions have to sign confirmations declaring that they have complied with state legislation and suggest that the signatories of the petition are qualified to be valid South Dakota voters. The confirmation should be registered by a notary.
The coalition’s lawyer said that although the notaries made errors by giving wrong dates of expiration for their commissions, there is no legislation demanding notaries to indicate the expiration dates correctly.
The lawsuit also stated that under the state legislation, the petitions should be liberally interpreted in order to construe the objective of the petitioners and should not be rejected due to a minor technicality of a third party.
