Pine Ridge organizer Shaun Little Horn corrects my report on the Green Party’s petition drive for official party status in South Dakota. The Greens had posted online last month that they were “just 2000 signatures away from securing ballot access for our candidates.” Given it takes 3,502 signatures to qualify as an official party, that figure suggested the Greens had 1,500 signatures in hand, a rather slim increase from the 1,000 they said they had on their petition a year ago.

Dakota Free Press
By Cory Allen Heidelberger
September 11, 2023

Little Horn rejoins that his team has 3,500 signatures in hand and that the 2,000 more they need are the cushion they want against signatures the Secretary of State may boot for lack of voter registration or other errors. Perfectly sensible.

Little Horn tells this blog that most of the signatures collected so far have come from Oglala Lakota and Pennington counties, where the Greens have been “registering voters and reigniting the interest of inactive voters within our tribal communities.” Citing South Dakota’s long and ugly history of suppressing Native voters, Little Horn says his group is meticulously checking signatures, addresses, and the voter registration list to make sure their petition passes muster.

Little Horn says the Greens are aiming to submit their petition by the end of October to avoid losing too many signatures to the one-year expiration date of signatures on party-formation petitions.