In the News

“South Dakotans know their families and neighbors deserve health care without going into debt or avoiding check-ups, procedures, and medication they need,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of The Fairness Project, which backed the measure.

"South Dakota has felt like the most challenging of the Medicaid expansion fights that we've taken on, and a lot of things could have gone wrong along the way," Kelly Hall said, lauding the coalition her group and others built to get the measure passed.

“South Dakotans know their families and neighbors deserve healthcare without going into debt or avoiding check-ups, procedures and medication they need,” Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a progressive organization that supports ballot initiatives, said in a news release.

Ballot proposals, according to Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, which backs progressive ballot measures, can be “a much more distilled way of getting a sense of voters’ enthusiasm."

“There’s been this vacuum of leadership, and in places where voters can take matters into their own hands, they’re doing it,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, which has worked to support minimum wage and Medicaid expansion initiatives across the country.

Ballot referendums are a particularly useful tool in states where a gap exists between what voters want and what their state legislatures are doing, said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, an organization that worked with the abortion rights ballot campaigns in Vermont and Michigan.

“Citizens took matters into their own hands to pass Medicaid expansion via ballot measure, showing us once again that if politicians won’t do their job, their constituents will step up and do it for them,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, an advocacy group that helped lead the ballot initiative.

Amendment D in South Dakota, which will expand healthcare coverage through Medicaid to residents earning less than $19,000 per year, also gained approval. The campaign’s pitch — which was backed by the Fairness Project, an organization that supports a handful of ballot initiatives across the country — was that federal tax dollars.