South Dakota’s long, strange trip with Monae Johnson

Recent events have some South Dakota Republicans questioning the integrity of “election integrity” enthusiast Monae Johnson. This happened after the secretary of state endorsed a Democrat who’s running for election to her office.

Johnson’s election as secretary of state and her tenure there has been a long, strange trip. At the 2022 Republican convention, she unseated incumbent Steve Barnett by disparaging as too risky his emphasis on technology to implement online voting and online voter registration. Johnson promised an emphasis on election integrity with her supporters putting an emphasis on hand-counting ballots.

That year, South Dakotans elected an election denier to run their elections. Johnson staunchly refused to say if Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

Johnson must have felt a sense of deja vu at this year’s Republican convention as election integrity advocates turned against her. She was jettisoned in favor of Heather Baxter, a candidate whose website said at the time she was in favor of hand-counting ballots. Johnson’s downfall at the convention can likely be attributed to this quote from her speech to delegates: “I trust the county auditors and I fully support the use of secure, tested ballot tabulators.”

South Dakota’s top election official, a Republican, endorses a Democrat to succeed her

If she is elected, Baxter will learn what Johnson already knows. There’s a big difference between being a voting integrity advocate and being secretary of state. Baxter made Johnson’s perceived shortcomings in the area of voting integrity the main reason why convention delegates should put Baxter on the ballot instead. What Baxter ignored, at her own peril, is the full scale of tasks for which the secretary of state has responsibility. In addition to the Division of Elections, the secretary of state oversees responsibilities as vast as they are diverse, including but not limited to: annual reports for businesses, trademarks, pistol permits and information about lobbyists. Obviously there’s more to the job than wrangling county auditors.

If she ascends to the office, Baxter is likely to find that the legislators in her own party are not nearly as enthusiastic about hand-counting ballots as were the delegates at the Republican convention. Lawmakers are also politicians. Many of them, as good Republicans, probably have discrete “election integrity” tattoos. As politicians, the last thing they want to do on Election Day is wait around all night for results.

Hand-counting ballots would add hours to the process in small towns and add days to getting results in the state’s larger communities. In an age of instant gratification, waiting around for election results isn’t in our DNA. No matter what they have said about election integrity in the past, Republican lawmakers will be hesitant about going back to the wild west days when men were men and ballots were counted by hand.

Another lesson headed Baxter’s way is that integrity isn’t lacking in South Dakota elections. While the election process is far-flung and can be complicated, in this state it is largely free of fraud. Hand-counting — another term for adding the propensity for human error to the process — certainly won’t make our elections any safer or the tally more accurate.

Johnson’s endorsement of Democrat Terrence Davis sparked some chatter about her embrace of proven election methods and her casting off the foolishness inherent in those who cry out for more election integrity without evidence that our elections need improvement. While her philosophy may be changing, that doesn’t alter the fact that her tenure as secretary of state has been a bumpy one:

• Her implementation of new voter registration laws was so ham-handed that it sparked a lawsuit.
• Her office was a little too transparent when it accidentally outed thousands of people on public assistance while publishing voter information.
• Her office mishandled early voting in the June primary, which ended up starting late.
• Her office incorrectly told independent candidates that they needed hundreds more signatures to get on the ballot than they actually did.
• In keeping with a trait that’s far too prevalent in state government, her office is noted for standing by mute when there is a request for information from the press.

Obviously Johnson was better at getting her job than she was at keeping it. She’s a politician who agitated her way into the secretary of state’s office. She knows how to make waves and she whipped up a tsunami by endorsing a Democrat.

With a list of flubs and mistakes to her credit, maybe getting passed over at the convention was a blessing in disguise. The next secretary of state will be comforted by the notion that Johnson certainly has not set the bar too high.