South Dakota

SDCL 12-6-51.1 sends a U.S. Senate, U.S. House or gubernatorial race with three or more candidates and no thirty-five percent winner to a runoff eight weeks after the primary — June 2 plus eight weeks, July 28. The official calendar carries a Runoff Election Procedures section ending in RUNOFF ELECTION DAY. The live results portal headers the same election “Primary Election July 28, 2026.” A harvester trusting the portal's label records a primary on the wrong date, or overwrites June 2 with runoff figures. The statute adds that a runoff without a federal race may drop the electronic ballot marking system and use hand-counted ballots, so the equipment in use is a function of what remains on the ballot.

Public Utilities Commissioner, Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Auditor, State Treasurer and Commissioner of School and Public Lands are nominated at each party's state convention and appear only on the general election ballot. A candidate inventory assembled from primary results is permanently missing six statewide offices — not conditionally, as under Iowa's convention fallback, but by design every cycle. Their nomination has no vote total, no precinct breakdown and no primary record at all.

The results portal states that its turnout figures “only include active registered voters who have a ballot available to them in their county,” that the calculation is based on active voters only, and separately that its Registered Voters column means everyone registered by the deadline. The July 28 runoff ran on a Republican ballot style, so its 35.92% is 118,123 ballots over 328,882 party-scoped, ballot-scoped registrations — not a statewide rate. Comparing it against a general-election turnout, or against a neighbouring state's, compares different populations that share a column heading.

Brookings, Brown, Douglas, Haakon, Hughes, Hyde, Oglala Lakota, Potter, Sully and Yankton use electronic pollbooks and vote centers, so their results carry no precinct rows at all — and each vote center row repeats the whole county's registration figure rather than its own share. Brown's 13,172 registrations appear against twelve vote centers, Brookings's 10,613 against nine, Yankton's 7,826 against eight. Summing the registered-voter column down the page yields 658,086 against the state's own 328,882: more than double, and the error is concentrated in ten counties.

Convention delegates and precinct committeemen and committeewomen are elected at the primary only where a party's own bylaws designate it. For 2026 the Republican Party elects one committeeman and one committeewoman per precinct and elects its convention delegates; the Democratic and Libertarian parties do neither. So the office exists on one party's ballot and not another's in the very same precinct, and the governing document is a private organisation's rules. An office inventory drawn from statute alone will not find these, and one drawn from a single party's ballot will over-generalise them.

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time under SDCL 12-2-1 and 12-2-3, and the state spans two time zones — so the statewide close is two separate absolute moments an hour apart, and returns begin arriving from one half of the state while the other is still voting. The state's own election calendar also warns county auditors that clocks fall back on Sunday, November 1, two days before the general. Anything treating a poll-closing time as one statewide timestamp is wrong for half the counties.

Water Development District directors are nominated in a nonpartisan primary from a director area, needing 25 signatures of registered voters in that area under SDCL 46A-3B-4. Heartland Consumer Power District directors run from numbered subdivisions — 4, 5 and 6 are up for six-year terms — needing 50 signatures under SDCL 49-36-1.3, and file with the Secretary of State rather than a county. These districts follow water and power service areas, so their boundaries nest inside neither counties nor municipalities, and a candidate's filing office is the state even though the constituency is sub-county.

The county recorder is a register of deeds here; there is a statewide Commissioner of School and Public Lands with no counterpart in most states; the sub-unit of a water development district is a director area and of a power district a subdivision; and the county governing body is a board of commissioners whose seat count is not fixed statewide. Matching on county recorder, land commissioner or district number returns nothing, and the county office count cannot be derived by multiplying sixty-six by a constant.