Important safety tip: Don’t believe everything you read coming from political parties, campaigns or even the media.

Larry Pressler's voter registration, accessed 1:30 p.m., Oct. 10, 2014, by NPN from South Dakota Secretary of State website. Street address redacted.
Larry Pressler's voter registration, accessed 1:30 p.m., Oct. 10, 2014, by NPN from South Dakota Secretary of State website. Street address redacted.
loading...

Pressler is registered to vote in Sioux Falls as an independent in legislative district 12, according to the South Dakota Secretary of State’s voter file.

As proof, the critics say Pressler gets a tax deduction for having his “principle residency” in Washington, D.C.

Fine. But what does South Dakota law say?

The South Dakota Secretary of State’s website cites SDCL12-1-4 defining residency to vote in South Dakota.

The statute states the requirements matter of factly:

From South Dakota Secretary of State website.

For the purposes of this title, the term, residence, means the place in which a person has fixed his or her habitation and to which the person, whenever absent, intends to return.

 

A person who has left home and gone into another state or territory or county of this state for a temporary purpose only has not changed his or her residence.

 

A person is considered to have gained a residence in any county or municipality of this state in which the person actually lives, if the person has no present intention of leaving.

 

If a person moves to another state, or to any of the other territories, with the intention of making it his or her permanent home, the person thereby loses residence in this state.

Let’s go through the statute line by line:

Has Pressler “fixed his habitation” to which he “intends to return”? There does not appear to be evidence that his Sioux Falls address is any place other than where he intends to live. People can have more than once residence or place to live. That's not the same as "habitation."

Has Pressler “left home and gone to another state,” etc. for a “temporary purpose”? There is no evidence that says he has left his current residence, temporarily or otherwise.

Does Pressler have “no intention of leaving” D.C.? Objectively, it looks like he has left D.C. but has an apartment there for when his wife Harriet works in D.C.

Has Pressler left South Dakota for D.C. and “intends to live” there? There is no evidence of that.

Nowhere in the law does it say anything about taking a tax break on a second home in another out of state location or whether you have a non-South Dakota phone number.

I’ll use myself as an example. I lived in Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq for 18 months. I had an apartment in Erbil. I had an Iraqi phone number. I did not consider Erbil my home and did not plan to remain there even though I spent more time in Iraq than I did in South Dakota at the time. I worked for the Kurdistan Regional Government at the airport. I voted in the 2012 South Dakota primary and general elections via absentee ballot, listing my residence in Harrisburg as my voting address. Harrisburg is and was my home. Has been since April 1995.

So, was I an Iraqi? No more so than Pressler is a D.C. resident.

Was it politically stupid to accept a D.C. tax break on a D.C. residence, particularly after the reaming Sen. Tom Daschle took for doing the same thing in his defeat in 2004? Yes.

Is it politically stupid to have a non-South Dakota area code for a cellphone you use in a South Dakota campaign? Yes. But do you know any longtime South Dakotans with Iowa, Minnesota or Nebraska area codes for the cellphones? I know I do.

Are either dispositive of an intent to not be a South Dakotan, and hence, not a South Dakota voter under South Dakota law? No.

As my civil procedure professor told us in law school a long time ago, “Don’t think great thoughts, read the statute.”

Pressler’s opponents and critics might want to do the same.

More From KXRB