HJR5003 proposes a change to South Dakota’s constitution that would require any future constitutional amendment to receive at least 60 percent of the vote, rather than a simple majority, to be approved.
The South Dakota State House of Representatives passed HJR5003 on January 22, 2025 by a vote of 61 to 5. We have assigned pluses to the ayes because a supermajority of the electorate—not the current threshold of only more than 50 percent of voters—should be required to approve of any legitimate changes to the South Dakota Constitution. While the United States Founders believed that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, they understood that a simple majority is insufficient to protecting the individual rights and liberty of the people from the “dangers of democracy,” which threaten to result in a “tyranny of the majority” or “elective despotism.” This explains why the U.S. Constitution, in Article IV, Section 4, explicitly guarantees to “every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” It provides that government be limited to the ‘rule of law,’ as opposed to mere ‘majority rule’ in a democracy.
