Dana Hess writes for South Dakota Searchlight, an online news organization.

South Dakota citizens have had the right to petition issues on to the ballot since 1898. Some legislators would like to put an end to that.

The prevailing wisdom in the Legislature seems to be that voters here are suffering from “ballot fatigue.” They claim voters are just sick and tired of all the initiated measures and constitutional amendments on the ballot.

In reality, “ballot fatigue” is just a legislative code phrase for “let’s make it so tough to get an issue on the ballot that citizens will just give up.” That was the impetus behind House Joint Resolution 5003, a constitutional amendment that’s already on the ballot for 2026.

The measure was sponsored by an irony-impaired Republican representative from Sioux Falls, John Hughes. Hughes didn’t think it was at all odd to say that voters were “fatigued” by the seven 2024 ballot issues, all the while sponsoring his own constitutional amendment for the 2026 election.

Hughes’ ballot measure calls for constitutional ballot issues to need 60% of the vote to be enacted. Currently those measures have to get just more than 50% to become part of the constitution. (There’s more irony to go around. Hughes placed his 60% amendment on the ballot in chambers where all he needed to do was convince just more than half of his colleagues it was a good idea. In 2026, if the 60% threshold is approved by voters, it will need just more than 50% of the votes cast.)

Lawmakers had quite a time with ballot issues during the 2025 legislative session.

They may be suffering from their own version of ballot fatigue as they considered 11 ballot issues, ultimately placing four of them on the 2026 ballot. There’s another legislative session before the next election. That’s another chance for lawmakers to endorse even more ballot measures.

A check of the Secretary of State’s website shows there are already six other ballot issues waiting in the wings for the 2026 ballot. Their backers will try to get them on the ballot the old-fashioned way: by collecting the signatures of registered voters. It takes 17,508 signatures to get an initiated measure on the ballot and 35,017 signatures before voters can consider a constitutional amendment.

There’s a stark disparity between the relative ease that lawmakers have if they want to get a measure on the ballot and the drudgery of collecting thousands of signatures for citizen-led ballot efforts.

If voters are suffering from ballot fatigue, perhaps lawmakers are suffering from “ballot envy,” an anguish rooted in the realization that there are people in the state with far more will and determination than they have when it comes to getting an issue before the voters.

When they talk about ballot fatigue, lawmakers would have you believe that they want to protect voters from the chore of making a few extra choices on Election Day. The real definition of ballot fatigue is that lawmakers are tired of seeing issues appear and reappear on the ballot that don’t conform to their worldview. Given the current Republican super-majorities in both chambers, there’s no other way than through a ballot initiative for citizens to get issues like abortion and marijuana legalization in front of voters.

For Republicans, it’s not the voting that’s tiring but the effort it takes every two years to fight off ideas that they find disagreeable. They point to the cavalcade of political commercials as a bad thing rather than celebrating the notion that political messages are just our free speech rights in action.

Of course ballot fatigue is a play on words, substituting the word ballot for battle. But South Dakotans are in a real battle to keep their access to the ballot. It’s a battle in which we can’t afford to get fatigued.