Brennan Center for Justice

South Dakota currently has the Automated Registration at DMVs component of Voter Registration Modernization in place. South Dakota also has electronic pollbooks in at least one county.

Registered voters who have moved within the state can cast a ballot that counts through Election Day even if they had not previously updated their registration information.  These voters can go to their old polling place (corresponding to the address where they were previously registered) to cast a regular ballot that will count; once there, they can fill out a change of address form.  For more on permanent registration in South Dakota, please see our Brennan Center report [pdf] on permanent voter registration.

The excerpt below was adapted from an appendix to the 2010 report Voter Registration in a Digital Age.

Background
South Dakota officials began electronically transmitting voter registrations in PDF format from the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to county election officials in January 2006.  As in North Carolina, South Dakota election officials had decided to adopt such an automated system years before and lacked only the money to proceed; this the Help America Vote Act of 2002 finally provided. Development took about twelve to eighteen months, and the total cost was approximately $60,000.

Outcomes
Voter Registration.  South Dakota has seen a truly striking increase in voter registrations at the DPS. Their number rose from 4755 in 2001-02 and 5670 in 2003-04 to 19,710 in 2005-06, and 39,371 in 2007-08.4 In relative terms the DPS has gone from accounting for one in twenty-five registrations to more than one in three. The effect of this shift on total registration rates, however, is not yet clear.

Efficiency.  County officials must still copy the registration data from PDF files into their computer systems, and so still incur data entry costs. However, Secretary of State Chris Nelson believes that errors have decreased with the elimination of legibility problems, and that the accuracy of the new system has contributed to a drop in the use of provisional ballots.
 

Track Record & Future Plans
DPS employees occasionally failed to copy registration data into their computers during the automated system’s first year, but this problem has since been resolved.9 Otherwise there have been no problems with the new system. Currently the DPS is working to improve its system for collecting digitized signatures.

How Paperless Registration Works in South Dakota
For Visitors.  Visitors do business with the DPS by filling out an application form, which now includes a voter registration section where applicants may indicate if they would like to register or update a registration, as well as provide their party affiliation and information about any previous registration. Before 2006, the DPS made voter registration available to visitors by placing stacks of voter registration forms alongside its own applications.

For Motor Vehicle and Election Officials. DPS employees copy completed application forms into their computers, including any registration information. When they have flagged a record for voter registration, a program automatically retrieves the record’s digitized signature and registration data that night, batches them into a PDF file, and stores the file on a secure site.

The program then sends county officials an e-mail with a link they can follow to pull up and print their applications. The statewide voter registration system directs an application to a particular county based on the county of residence it lists, which customers provide at the DPS. If the county listed is incorrect, officials can redirect the application electronically. Officials copy the data they receive into their own computer systems and review them in the same way they would paper forms.