Statewide voter turnout in 2024 returns to presidential year average for South Dakota

Ricky Hannasch takes his ballot from a poll worker in order to vote in the Nov. 5, 2024 general election at St. Lambert's Catholic Church in Sioux Falls. (Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)

A few weeks before the general election, Secretary of State Monae Johnson said she expected a voter turnout as high as 75%.

That figure would have been a point higher than in 2020, the last presidential election year, and six points higher than the 2016 general election contest.

In the end, the 2024 turnout in South Dakota looked more like 2016, landing at 70%.

The county with the highest turnout was Jones, where just over 82% of registered voters cast a ballot. Oglala Lakota County, home to the Pine Ridge Reservation, had the lowest turnout, at 39%.

The same two counties were first and last in voter turnout in 2020, when Jones saw 86% of voters cast a ballot and Oglala Lakota saw a 41% turnout.

This year, Minnehaha led turnout with around 70% among the three largest counties by population. Brown County turnout stood at 67%, Pennington at 64%.

Tribal areas typically see lower turnout than the rest of the state, in part to large distances between polling places and a greater share of residents without access to transportation. Monique "Muffy" Mousseau is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who lives and works in Rapid City for an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization called Uniting Resilience. She was one of four volunteers for the organization who offered free rides to voters on Election Day in her area. They covered around 15 square miles, she said, but "we got almost 50 calls from all across the state of South Dakota asking for rides to the polls."

Those calls came from as far away as Aberdeen, as well as from members of the Oglala Lakota, Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux tribes, she said.