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From the Mitchell Daily Republic, Democrat Troy Heinert is making noise about running for US House, and his allies seem to have selective amnesia in reference to one of South Dakota’s statesmen of years past.

During a gathering at the Fort Randall Casino & Hotel, state Sen. Troy Heinert was called a “rock star” by state Rep. Shawn Bordeaux. Bordeaux’s statements were followed by former state secretary of tribal relations and current director of tribal relations for Avera Health, J.R. LaPlante, who said the state will need to see a minority candidate in statewide office before South Dakota achieves equality.

After the trio offered remarks Friday, Heinert said he hasn’t ruled anything out. But he didn’t officially throw his trademark cowboy hat into the ring in the 2018 race for the state’s at-large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

And..

But 44-year-old Heinert, who has served in both houses of the South Dakota Legislature since first taking the oath of office in 2013, would instantly become the best known Democratic candidate in the race if he enters the field. Bordeaux or Heinert would join state Sen. Billie Sutton, a Burke Democrat running for governor, on the ballot in 2018.

And..

“I believe that we will have equality in the state of South Dakota when white people elect a person of color to state office, and not just a district position, but an at-large position, at statewide election,” LaPlante said.

Read that here.

LaPlante seems to be suffering selective political amnesia in the case of Congressman Ben Reifel, a Republican who was elected as the first Lakota to serve in the House of Representatives. He served five terms as a Republican United States Congressman from the First District. 

(You know, Congress. The same office he’s promoting Heinert for.)

I’d mentioned a month ago that I’d heard Dems were looking to Heinert to jump in the race, and that their potty-mouthed candidate Chris Martian was not a factor in state Dem machinations.  

Looks like we already knew how it was going to play out.

The Argus Leader has picked up the story about Secretary of State Shantel Krebs’ Vote605 App diverting people to her Congressional Campaign website, and in responding, Krebs’s response in the matter seems to come of as confusing as her earlier response to the issue:

Pat Powers, author of the conservative website Dakota War College and a supporter of Krebs’ opponent Dusty Johnson, first reported the connection late Thursday.

In the hours since, Krebs, a Republican candidate for U.S. House, removed the link from the Vote 605 app.

“It’s an oversight and it’s been resolved,” Krebs told Argus Leader Media on Friday afternoon. “We heard about it last night and fixed it right away.”

Krebs considered the situation a “pretty small issue” that arose from carrying over the app created by former Secretary of State Jason Gant. Attorney General Marty Jackley said the newly-formed Government Accountability Board could investigate the situation if it received complaints and deemed it worth probing.

Read it here.

Not trying to dig in on the issue, but a few points that seem to be muddled by either the writing style, or the response itself was incorrect.

#1 – It was not fixed right away. It was fixed at about 8 – 8:30 am this morning, as readers were checking it up until then.

#2 – The carrying over of the app had absolutely NOTHING to do with the error. I’m not sure how anyone could make that statement and assume that anyone would believe it.

The error was caused when the incoming Secretary of State directed the app developer to point the app at her campaign facebook page which had been re-branded as a non-campaign page.

The story did correctly note that it “was the unintended consequence of changing her secretary of state page to her congressional campaign page earlier this year.”

Just to clarify.

In the past, Secretary of State Shantel Krebs has criticized her predecessor for various things such as politics in office, and for computer related issues. So my ears perked up when I was told today that the Secretary of State’s 605 voter app has apparently been directing people to Krebs for Congress Campaign Facebook Page for several months now.

According to Secretary of State Shantel Krebs’ website, the intent of the Vote 605 mobile application is to help voters find valuable information about elections:

“Using this information-protected application, any registered South Dakota voter now has the ability to discover where they may vote, what is on their ballot, and any additional voter registration and election information pertaining to the user.

Read that here.

Unfortunately, (and we hope inadvertently) the Vote 605 App has fallen victim to the closeness of the Official functions of the Secretary of State’s office to her campaign efforts as she attempts to run for the US Congressional seat being vacated by Congresswoman Kristi Noem.

Because if you click on the app to go to what you think is Shantel Krebs’ Facebook page for the Secretary of State’s web site, you’re getting different information than what you might have expected. In fact, I filmed what I found when I clicked on it myself:

As was pointed out to me by a reader, the Vote 605 Voter Information App has apparently been sending people who click on the Facebook link not to a Facebook page for the Secretary of State, but to Shantel Krebs’ Federal Congressional Campaign Facebook page. (The twitter links to a more state related SOS Twitter page).

In fact, going looking for the actual Facebook page for Krebs in her role as the Secretary of State, there’s even a more curious discovery.  As in… there isn’t one.  Was there never one? Did it disappear?

This caused me a lot more sleuthing. What did I find?

There’s Krebs’ personal facebook page.  And there’s her Congressional facebook page which the 605 App links to as demonstrated. But if you search, there would not appear to be a public Facebook page for Krebs in her role as Secretary of State anymore for the 605 application to link to.

But, where did it go? If you look at the link for her Congressional page..  the link in the page for her Congressional Facebook page appears to have references to her being Secretary of State:

What I found was that this page – which had been used for and accepting the traffic & likes for Krebs’ role in the public sector office of Secretary of State – had been converted over to the purposes of the federal race. And as I found out after doing some retrospective digging, her Facebook page has been flowing all along and changing as she’s adopted various public personas during the years.

It appears that the page has gone from her time in the State Senate campaigning (watch the dates of the posts, all screen shot today)….

..to her Secretary of State 2014 campaign page..

…To the Official SOS Facebook page.

And sometime after this post, after the campaign page became her official SOS page, it was being used to promote the very app which was directing people to the now official facebook page..

Unfortunately, on March 13th of this year, the Krebs official SOS page was converted back over to campaign duty and over to her Congressional Campaign site…

…But the links in the 605 App were never changed.

During the prior conversion of Krebs’ campaign Facebook page into a website for a public official, at that time the linkage between the Facebook page and the official Secretary of State’s 605 App was established.  Unfortunately, when the Facebook page was reconverted to the political, it appears to have not been unlinked.

As was pointed out to me by a correspondent today, it begs the question “why was her campaign page converted to a public office page in the first place?”

As the SOS is finding, you can run into a problem when you’re co-mingling your campaign persona with that of being a public official. Because of the blurring, since at least since March 13th, the SOS’s official Vote 605 App’s Facebook link has been shuttling people to a page branded for the Secretary of State’s run for Congress.

Could it have been a political page all along? Sure. But if it was never intended to be a social media page for Krebs in her official role, and was only intended to be limited to her political activities, then why was it linked up to the State of South Dakota sponsored Vote 605 App in the first place?

Neither possible explanation comes off looking very good in this matter.

It’s probably telling how much people actually used the Facebook functionality for the Vote 605 App that it wasn’t discovered until now, nearly 4 months later.  And I suspect a lot is going to happen in short order to correct this as soon as I hit “publish” on this post, and there won’t be a reason to waste another breath on it.

But it might also represent a bump in the road for the Congressional Candidate whose campaign is almost solely based on her claims of being a reformer in the office of Secretary of State.

The phrase best used might be “physician, heal thyself.”

**UPDATE**

Since the Story broke, apparently Secretary Krebs has appeared on KELO AM Radio to offer a couple of comments.

Krebs: I don’t read blogs, only credible sources like https://t.co/iMMjsgQLd9.

— KELO (@keloradio) July 7, 2017

Krebs: Politicized Vote 605 app? It was an oversight that personal FB page was linked. Taken care of and resolved.

— KELO (@keloradio) July 7, 2017

An “oversight” that a “personal facebook page was linked?” Hmmm…

As noted above, the page that was linked was absolutely not her personal facebook page, but the political page she’s used ever since she’d established a facebook presence for the state legislature, and other offices. There never was an official SOS page. Just her political one that was modified for that use.

But, that’s her story, and apparently she’s sticking to it.

From the Rapid City Journal, former alderman Charity Doyle has been hired for a new position in Rapid City:

Read it here.

In case you want to read an offensive book with the above and more, order a copy from Amazon.com.

South Dakota State Republican party chairman Dan Lederman has an editorial in the Argus leader tonight where he takes a strong counterpoint to reporter Dana Ferguson’s article contending that Democrats lose in South Dakota because of some alleged, but non-existent gerrymandering:

Acting as an apologist for Democrats in the story, Ferguson tried to intimate that they would have more electoral success if legislative districts were drawn differently. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Why? For the same reason my dad would always say, “The world is ran by people who show up,” and in S.D., instead of showing up, Democrats have given up.

In the 2016 elections that were used in the Associated Press study, which Ferguson was writing about, in S.D., the Democratic Party did not run candidates in 30 percent of the State Senate races. Nearly one-third of the races were abandoned.

Mind you, as chair of the S.D. Republican Party, I’m not complaining about that fact. But I will take issue with someone ignoring the fact that Democrat chair Ann Tornberg made a decision to not run candidates in 30 percent of those races – and now, the Democrat party is trying to lay blame at their electoral failure on “gerrymandering.”

How the legislative districts were designed had nothing to do with it. They made a conscious decision to lose the races before one vote could even be cast. They chose not to show up. They didn’t show up in the State Senate. And in election after election before that, they have chosen not to run candidates for the legislature and many statewide offices.

That’s on them. Not Republicans.

But failing to run candidates for office is only part of the Democrat Party’s problems. State Democrats have had difficulty with candidate recruitment, voter registration, fund raising and a plethora of the functions that political parties are required to do to be viable operating organizations. It is very telling that S.D. Democrats are artificially being kept afloat by the national party giving them monthly stipends to keep the door open.

Read it here!

I must have missed Frank Kloucek in the Republican caucus all those years ago.  Civics by Stace Nelson.

(BTW, the reader who submitted this also pointed out that “Kloucek lost a county commission race in his hometown in a landslide in 2016 that most thought he would win, does he blame that on redistricting too?”)

There are days when you wonder if we still live in the same country we were born into, as it seems people anymore are actively seeking a cradle-to-grave welfare state.  Case in point, the crowd’s reaction at the recent town hall held by Kristi Noem, where people were cheering her warnings about socialized medicine:

and…

The philosophical divide was perhaps most starkly on display after the congresswoman sounded alarms about the shrinking number of private health insurance providers in the state.

“We used to have 17 health insurance companies in South Dakota. We have two today,” Noem said, adding that, “We are a year or two away from having government run health care.”

In reaction to Noem’s apparent reference to a universal, or single-payer, health care system, many in the audience erupted in loud cheers and thunderous applause.

Speaker of the House Mark Mickelson is pressing forward with his bill that failed during the last legislative session, HB 1200, and instead of making his case to his colleagues, is making his case directly to the people:

2018 IM BQCommContributionProvisions LRCComments by Pat Powers on Scribd

As noted in the Argus Leader:

Out-of-state labor unions, open primary advocacy groups, national payday lenders and Americans for Prosperity, the primary political arm of the Koch brothers, each spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting or opposing issues on last year’s ballot.

If they want to continue doing so, South Dakota residents have a right to know who’s footing the bill for all the television ads and campaign mailers, Mickelson said.

and..

Ben Lee, state director of Americans for Prosperity, said the measure would have a “chilling” impact on private donations to the group or to political speech.

“This was or would be a restriction on South Dakotans’ rights to free speech and association,” Lee said.

And where individuals feel comfortable donating to political advocacy issues now, they might choose not to do so in the future if they felt their boss or family member of a different political view might find out.

Read it all here.

We’re back at the point where we decide which side of the double edged sword we want to fall on once more.  Do we want to stop millions from pouring into the state to gin up ballot measures in South Dakota that no one was really asking for, as well as the millions to fight them?

And if that’s the case, do we want to do it at the expense of our Constitutional freedoms?

That makes the question a far more difficult one. And maybe it’s not the question we should be fighting, as opposed to the one of how easy it is to get things on the ballot in the state.

Right now, for the 2018 election, there are 5 ballot measures currently circulating, with fifteen more that are being prepared for the ballot.  As noted on the Secretary of State’s Website, this is the electoral mess that we’re currently facing for 2018:

2018 Ballot Measures – Currently Circulating

Title & Official Petition	Circulator Handout/ Sponsor Info	Attorney General’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Initiated Measure authorizing a South Dakota-Licensed Physician to prescribe drugs that a terminally ill patient may take for the purpose of ending life.	Circulator Handout	Attorney General’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Initiated Measure to legalize certain amounts of marijuana, drugs made from marijuana, and drug paraphernalia, and to regulate and tax marijuana establishments	Circulator Handout	Atorney General’s Statement	LRC Comments Sponsor Draft #2	Prison Cost Estimate
An Initiated Measure to legalize marijuana for medical use.	Circulator Handout	Attorney General’s Statement	LRC Comments Sponsor Draft #2	Prison Cost Estimate
An Initiated Measure to legalize all quantities of marijuana and to make other changes to State law involving marijuana	Circulator Handout	Attorney General’s Statement	LRC Comments LRC Comments #2	Prison Cost Estimate
An Initiated Amendment to the South Dakota Constitution regarding initiated and referred measures	Circulator Handout	Attorney General’s Statement	Draft A Draft B Draft C	Prison Cost Estimate

Potential 2018 Ballot Measures

NOTE: The version of the measures posted along with LRC comments are not necessarily the final versions and could be subject to change by the sponsor. By law, the sponsor must present the final version of the measure to the Attorney General.

Potential 2018 Ballot Measures	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Initiated Measure requiring students to use rooms designated for the same biological sex, and requiring public schools to provide a reasonable accommodation for students whose gender identity is not the same as their biological sex	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An initiated amendment to the South Dakota Constitution changing campaign finance and lobbying laws, creating a government accountability board, and changing certain initiative and referendum provisions (VERSION #1)	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An initiated amendment to the South Dakota Constitution changing campaign finance and lobbying laws, creating a government accountability board, and changing certain initiative and referendum provisions. (VERSION #2)	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An initiated amendment to the South Dakota Constitution changing campaign finance and lobbying laws, and creating a government accountability board. (VERSION #3)	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An initiated amendment to the South Dakota Constitution changing campaign finance and lobbying laws, and creating a government accountability board. (VERSION #4)	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Initiated Measure requiring people to use certain rooms designated for the same biological sex	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Amendment to the Constitution to provide for non partisan elections and a non partisan appointment of the Legislature	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
South Dakota Voter Accessibility, Integrity, and Efficiency Act	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
South Dakota Voter Accessibility, Integrity, and Efficiency, and Automatic Voter Registration Act	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An open primary election shall be held prior to the general election to nominate the office of Governor, the Legislature, and the United States Senate and House of Representatives	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Act to prohibit contributions to ballot question committees by out-of-state residents, political committees, and entities and to establish civil penalties therefor	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Act to increase the tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products and to appropriate the revenues (45% Tax)	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Act to increase the tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products and to appropriate the revenues (55% Tax)	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Act to establish a prescription drug pricing law enabling citizens of the state of South Dakota to pay the same or lower prices for prescription drugs as the prices paid by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate
An Act to revise certain provisions regarding contributions to ballot question committees	AG’s Statement	LRC Comments	Prison Cost Estimate

Ugh. As if the 2016 ballot wasn’t cluttered and confusing enough. Now it might be worse in a year when it’s already longer due to constitutional officers being on the ballot as well?

If this is what we’re facing after last election, it makes a person want to start a movement that we might call “Don’t sign a damn thing.“

Gov. Daugaard Names Inaugural Members to Government Accountability Board

PIERRE, S.D. – Gov. Dennis Daugaard today announced his appointments to the new Government Accountability Board.

The board was created this legislative session by House Bill 1076, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Rep. Karen Soli of Sioux Falls and Sen. Brock Greenfield of Clark.

The legislation, which took effect July 1, requires that the board be made up of four retired justices or judges.  The board is empowered to receive ethics complaints about statewide elected officials or executive branch employees, initiate investigations into complaints and refer alleged criminal activity to the Division of Criminal Investigation.

“House Bill 1076 wisely required that the Government Accountability Board be made up of retired judges, who are by their nature non-political and are known for their judgment and discretion,” said Gov. Daugaard.  “These four appointees all have excellent reputations, and I thank them all for their service.  The public can be confident that state government will continue to be operated ethically and will deal with wrongdoing if it arises.”

The Governor’s appointees to the board are:

·         Justice Lori S. Wilbur, who retired from the South Dakota Supreme Court earlier this year after serving on the court since 2011.  Prior to that service, she was a Sixth Circuit judge from 1999 to 2011.  Wilbur also served as a magistrate judge and as an assistant attorney general, was chair of the South Dakota Judges Association, and served on the Judicial Qualifications Commission and the State Bar Ethics Committee.

·         Judge Gene Paul Kean, who served as a Second Circuit judge from 1981 to 2006 and is a past chair of the South Dakota Judges Association.  Prior to that service, he also served as Minnehaha County state’s attorney.

·         Judge David R. Gienapp, who served as a Third Circuit judge from 2002 to 2013.  Gienapp also served as an assistant attorney general, an assistant U.S. Attorney and as chair of the Judicial Qualifications Commission.

·         Judge Patricia C. Riepel, who served as a Second Circuit judge from 2007 to 2016 and is a past chair of the South Dakota Judges Association.  Prior to that service, she also served as a magistrate judge and as a Minnehaha County public defender.

House Bill 1076 required that no more than two board members be of the same political party.  Justice Wilbur and Judge Gienapp are registered Republicans; Judge Kean and Judge Riepel are registered Democrats.  The appointments are effective immediately and are subject to Senate confirmation during the next legislative session.

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