South Dakota Legislature referred Amendment L, raising constitutional-amendment threshold to 60%, a bar past citizen wins wouldn't have cleared

On March 10, 2025, the South Dakota State Senate voted 29-4 to give final passage to House Joint Resolution 5003, referring Constitutional Amendment L to South Dakota's November 2026 general-election ballot. The resolution, sponsored by state Rep. John Hughes, R-Sioux Falls, would raise the vote required to approve any constitutional amendment -- whether placed on the ballot by citizen petition or referred by the Legislature itself -- from a simple majority to 60%. The House had already passed the measure 61-5 on January 22, 2025; because the resolution needs no governor's signature, Senate passage was the final legislative action. South Dakota's Republican-controlled Legislature holds 97 of the chamber's 105 seats.

All four constitutional amendments South Dakota voters have approved since 2020 would have failed under the proposed 60% threshold, including a 2022 measure expanding Medicaid eligibility to more than 50,000 residents that passed with roughly 56% of the vote despite opposition from the Republican-controlled Legislature and governor. South Dakota voters have twice already rejected legislature-referred supermajority requirements for ballot measures, in 2018 and 2022.

Hughes told Bolts Magazine the change was needed because the current simple-majority threshold makes South Dakota "a target for being used as a laboratory for the emergence of new values" funded by "millions of out-of-state dollars." Rick Weiland, co-chair of Dakotans for Health, which led the 2022 Medicaid campaign, said Republican lawmakers are pursuing the change because their legislative control "can still be circumvented by the initiative process." Chase Jensen of Dakota Rural Action called it the third such legislative attempt to restrict direct democracy in about eight years, saying the prior two attempts, in 2018 and 2022, both failed by wide margins at the ballot box.

South Dakota was the first state in the country to adopt an initiative and referendum process, in 1898. Amendment L would apply the new 60% threshold retroactively to no past vote, but its backers' own stated rationale -- that simple-majority citizen amendments have repeatedly succeeded over legislative objection -- is what the archive records: a procedural rule written specifically to raise the bar after voters cleared the old one.