South Dakota

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The South Dakota project on Sunshine Review


Currently, there are 35 members of the state Senate and 70 members of the House of Representatives. The state is composed of 35 legislative districts. Voters elect one senator and two representatives from each district. The legislature meets for a thirty day session starting on the second Tuesday in January, and also if the governor calls a special session.

Help to build a transparent and accountable government in South Dakota


South Dakota Breaking News...

S.D. jury records to be closed, high court says

September 26, 2008: Worried about protecting jurors' personal information, the South Dakota Supreme Court last week decided all records created during jury selection should not be available to the public unless the trial judge says otherwise.

Presiding circuit judges across the state proposed the change as they grew increasingly concerned about identity theft and the potential that someone would embarrass jurors by distributing their answers to sensitive questions. Read the full article here.

Kudos to Pierre for records Web site
September 16, 2008: Up is down, black is white, and the state of South Dakota has a new Web site collecting copious amounts of public information.

OK, maybe that's a flip response to something that is in fact a real victory for free and open access to government: the state's new OpenSD Web site.

But South Dakota's record when it comes to government openness is not the best. The Legislature has yet to pass a truly comprehensive open records law - one that presumes openness and then lays out reasonable exceptions. Read the full editorial here.

Open records law amended
July 12, 2008: South Dakota media and public officials sometimes bump heads on access to government records.

Reporters have a tendency to believe that nearly all records should be open to the public.

Officials are not so sure about that, and the two sides occasionally disagree. Read the full article here.

...more South Dakota news

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Portions of this article were taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under the GNU license.