Medical marijuana advocates in South Dakota are excited as Secretary of State Shantel Krebs has announced that her office will recheck of the validity of signatures for an initiated measure that had been previously rejected by Krebs’s office.
The advocates were trying to get the medical-marijuana initiated measure on the November general election ballot, but last month the Secretary of State’s office ruled that too many of the signatures on the initiative petition were invalid.
Late Friday afternoon, Krebs said that she had the chance to read the complaint filed Thursday, and her office will conduct a new 5 percent random sampling of the signatures starting as early as today.
The official challenge was filed on Thursday afternoon by the author of the measure, Melissa Mentele of Emery. The challenge, in the form of an affidavit, accused the Secretary of State’s office of making several large mistakes in the process of validating signatures for the initiated measure, including conducting an oversample of the petition…

Mentele was surprised that the Secretary of State’s office announced that they were going to perform the recount…

Still, even after the recount, Mentele is not sure that her issue will come before the voters in November…

The example of a notary error, according to Mentele, was that the notary forgot to put the day the notary license runs out and only had the month and the year.
South Dakota law says that the Secretary of State will perform only a 5 percent random sampling of the signatures to assure their validity. Mentele’s challenge affidavit says that the Secretary of State’s office pulled 160 more signatures than it was required to check.