Following legislative session, a lot of political activists and organizations look at how the lawmakers align with their respective beliefs.
One new “scorecard” is aiming to do just that on voting issues.
The scorecard is created by the Voter Defense Association South Dakota. Group leaders say their goal is to protect voter rights, which they believe are under attack.
The VDA looked at bills pertaining to the Initiated Process and scored legislators on how they voted on each bill aligning with the organization’s beliefs.
Legislators were scored by either gaining or losing “points” based on a yes or no vote on either their respective chamber’s floor or in committee.
Matt Schweich is the President of VDA. He said though Democrats have traditionally voted more in favor of the organization’s beliefs, three Senate Republicans scored the highest.
Those three Republicans were Senators Kyle Schoenfish, David Wheeler and Michael Rohl. On the House side, the top three scores were given to Democrat Representatives Nicole Uhre-Balk, Kadyn Wittman and Erin Healy.
"We as an organization do not think that the Initiated Process should be a partisan issue. It’s a question of process and it’s a question of the Constitutional rights of the people of South Dakota," Schweich said. "It shouldn’t be a red or blue issue at all. And so, it’s very encouraging that the three top Senators are all Republicans, and that’s something we want to build on."
Schweich said he expected the Senate to align closer to the views of VDA than the House based on his experiences in Pierre, but once he looked at all the data the gap between was larger than anticipated.
“I was little surprised it was different to such a degree. When you look at the Senate there’s quite a few As and Bs and B+s relative to the size of the overall size of the chamber with 35 members," Schweich said. "The House, it’s a lot of Ds and a lot of Fs. We expected a difference, we expected the Senate to better. I don’t think we expected the Senate to be this much better."
