Tag: South Dakota as low-tax haven

Full-timers add to election denialism

It’s depressing to realize, in this age of political extremism and escalating threats to democratic governance, that among the most blithe contributors to this sorry state of affairs are full-timing RVers. Not all full-timers, I hasten to add. Just those who think that their chosen lifestyles as so-called “travelers” should exempt them from fundamental civic obligations while leaving their civic rights intact—even as that attitude further chips away at voter confidence in the integrity of our elections.

I’m talking, of course, about the arrogance reflected in stories such as this one, “South Dakota county moves to restrict voting rights for full-time RVers,” which was published by RVtravel a couple of days ago. Written by Nanci Dixon, reprising her laments of last year about being called for jury duty by a state in which she doesn’t live, the piece continues her tendency to assume nefarious motives where none have been proven and to insist that full-time RVers are being disenfranchised simply because they are rootless—or as she prefers to think of herself, “full-time travelers.”

Let’s start with the latter fiction. Dixon winters in Arizona and spends her summers work-camping, which is to say, for most of each year she’s putting her roots down in one place or another. That’s not to say that she doesn’t travel, but it is to say that the travel is largely incidental to her getting from one semi-permanent campground site to another. Dixon is not a “full-time traveler” as much as she is a full-time RV-dweller, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it should be noted that South Dakota apparently is not one of those semi-permanent dwelling places.

South Dakota is, however, the state Dixon and thousands of other full-timers have claimed as their official domiciles for unabashedly self-serving reasons, chief among them the absence of a state income tax or a personal property tax on vehicles. You, too, can have such perks. All you need is a couple of hundred bucks to rent a mailbox at one of a handful of the state’s mail-forwarding services, spend a night in town to nail down your status as an “official resident,” and just like that you’ll have everything you need to get a South Dakota driver’s license—and until last summer, the voter registration that came with it.

But the problems with that loosey-goosey arrangement, as I detailed a year ago, should be readily apparent, and especially in an age when ensuring voting integrity is all the rage (and I do mean rage). Concerned about the potential for abuse (one fanciful scenario contemplated thousands of liberal Minnesotans driving into the Republican state for a 24-hour stay and the opportunity to sway an election), the South Dakota legislature last year adopted new rules requiring voters to attest they’d actually lived in the state f0r 30 days or more in the year prior to voting.

Such a requirement isn’t unique—Alaska, Illinois and Nevada, among others, have similar residency rules—but it does pose several problems. The most obvious is that while South Dakota has an understandable interest in restricting voting on state and local issues to state and local residents, the residency requirement puts arguably unconstitutional limitations on voting in national elections. A more pragmatic problem is simply one of enforceability: how can election officials determine whether the residency requirement has been met? For that reason alone, a similar law was enacted and then repealed after just a year more than two decades ago.

Yet there’s also little question that South Dakota—and presumably other states that offer mailbox residency, notably Texas and Florida— has a problem. Approximately 60,000 out-of-state vehicles were registered in South Dakota five years ago, and that number undoubtedly has since increased. More than 6,3000 people are registered to vote at the address of mail-forwarding company Americas Mailbox in Box Elder, while as many as 1,400 registered South Dakota voters “live” in the mailboxes of My Home Address in the town of Emery—or roughly three times the town’s actual population. That’s a whole lot of imaginary residents capable of creating very real election havoc.

Now that problem has erupted, following a June 4 primary in which two candidates lost by a small margin—a loss quite possibly affected by election officials, citing the new residency requirement, declining to count 132 ballots that had been cast by people registered with a mailbox address. The ACLU of South Dakota has jumped in, challenging that decision but also demanding that no “improper challenges will be entertained” during the Nov. 5 general election, paving the way for even more election denialism in the months ahead. “South Dakota has been heralded as the freest state in the nation,” the ACLU thundered with questionable assurance in a June 21 press release, “but restricting access to one of the most fundamental rights we have as Americans—participating in our democracy through voting—strips residents of the freedom to take part in our elections.”

Residents? Really?

To be sure, this is a problem of South Dakota’s own making. But it remains a problem because of public pressure from libertarian RVers and screeds like Dixon’s. Contrary to the headline, South Dakota is not moving to restrict the voting rights of full-time RVers, but of people who don’t live in their state while pretending they do. Dixon could always register to vote in Arizona, and perhaps should, since that’s where she spends a big chunk of her time—but that would mean shouldering the civic responsibilities that come with it, such as paying Arizona taxes and serving Arizona jury duty.

Far more lucrative to go venue shopping for states that allow a disconnect between rights and responsibilities, loading up on the former, disregarding the latter and taking offense when asked how it became socially acceptable to be a freeloader.

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‘No mercy’ for RVing full-timers

A recruiting pitch a few years ago, at the annual Quartzite RV show, for RVers to become South Dakota residents. Quartzite is in Arizona, which is a long way from South Dakota.

A staff writer and columnist for RVtravel, an online magazine and news service, yesterday demonstrated yet again why gypsies, travelers and other foot-loose wanderers so often are regarded with suspicion and resentment—not because of their supposed freedom, as some prefer to believe, but because they’re seen as parasites.

Writing under the somewhat misleading headline, “Full-time RVers not welcome here: South Dakota’s attempt to prevent RVers from voting and residency sparks outrage and concerns,” Nanci Dixon whined about a summons for jury duty received by her husband, requiring him to be on call for 30 days starting sometime in September. The problem? The Dixons aren’t actually in South Dakota, even though that’s where they get their mail, vote and have their RV registered. They are in fact full-time RVers and currently are working as campground hosts in another state, where they’re expected to remain until October 20. They also have medical appointments and a minor skin cancer treatment scheduled through that date. Jury duty over the next couple of months, as far as the Dixons are concerned, is simply a no-go.

Okay. Jury duty almost invariably is inconvenient—even for those, as Dixon claimed for herself in a subsequently appended comment, who “look at Jury Duty as a responsibility and an honor.” But when Dixon asked Minnehaha County officials to postpone this responsibility and honor, she was aghast at their response. “They showed no mercy,” she wrote. “We were only offered a chance to move it within the year. No, not next year after the spring thaw, but in November or December of this year. December in South Dakota in the winter . . . on icy roads . . . in a motorhome. And over Christmas! More than 1,600 miles from our snowbird retreat! To say I was shocked is an understatement.”

Wow. Inconvenience piled on inconvenience, by a court system that clearly doesn’t understand the Dixons aren’t, you know—South Dakotans. That the Dixons are horrified, for instance, by the idea of driving on their adopted state’s roads in winter, when apparently all of South Dakota should simply shut down. That the Dixons have pressing responsibilities, but apparently not in the state they claim as their own, with jobs in one place and a winter retreat in another and doctor appointments who knows where—except not, it seems, in South Dakota, so South Dakota’s people should just call the Dixons’ people and work out something that will fit the latter’s busy non-South Dakota schedule.

Again: wow.

The irony is that this precious behavior is as much South Dakota’s doing as it is the Dixons’. RVers who have sold their bricks-and-sticks homes and live year-round in their RVs still need a legal address, so they can get mail and claim residency to open bank accounts, register to vote, apply for a driver’s license or perform any number of the other dull bureaucratic duties that come with living in a society. And South Dakota has been only too willing (as are Texas and Florida, to a slightly lesser extent) to court such low-maintenance customers, advertising itself as a low-tax, low-consequence haven for the foot-loose and fancy-free. No state income tax! No personal property tax! No pension or (state) social security tax! No vehicle inspections, low vehicle license fees and low, low car insurance rates!

Best of all, the whole “become a Mount Rushmore State resident” process is as slick as those icy roads Nanci Dixon doesn’t want to navigate in December. Spend a couple of hundred bucks for a mail box at one of a handful of mail forwarding services. Spend a night in the state to nail down your status as an “official resident.” (Indeed, one of those mail forwarding services, South Dakota Residency Center, operates out of the Spearfish Black Hills KOA campground—how convenient is that?) And just like that you’ll have everything you need to get a South Dakota driver’s license, good for five years before it has to be renewed, and the keys to the kingdom will be yours.

Almost.

One fly in this officially sanctioned ointment of fictional residency is that being domiciled entails having voting rights—and with a growing number of transient “South Dakotans” having no more connection to the state than a one-night stand, it’s fair to ask why they should have a voice in how the state or its counties should be run. As Dixon herself wrote, albeit to explain why nothing should be expected from her, “As most South Dakota full-time RVers, we rarely travel there. We do not use the roads, the schools, parks or a myriad of other things.” And yet as a South Dakota full-time RVer, Dixon can vote on tax issues, for South Dakota’s Congressional representation and for everything in between, including city council and school board positions. If the people who actually live in South Dakota decided, for example, that they should institute a personal property tax to help fund their public schools, any serious doubt about how the Rvers would vote?

Nor is this a trivial population. Americas Mailbox, one of the state’s biggest mail forwarding services, is located in the town of Box Elder and has more than 9,000 registered voters among the 15,500 people using its address. In the 2020 general election, according to reporting by local television station KELO, 5,856 of those “one-day residents” cast ballots—or more than half of the 10,119 people that actually live in Box Elder. Only 39 of those Americas Mailbox “residents” voted in person; the rest voted by mail.

Or consider a report by the Dakota Free Press that the “three residency mills” of Americas Mailbox, South Dakota Residency Center and Dakota Post have a combined total of 27,000 members. “If those ersatz residents all vote, they constitute 4.6% of the currently registered South Dakota electorate,” it summarized, observing that in 2018, Kristi Noem won her gubernatorial race by a margin of only 11,458 votes.

Such outsized influence by outsiders has raised some hackles in the state, which recently amended its voting registration laws to require that voters have “an actual fixed permanent dwelling, establishment, or any other abode” in South Dakota to which they return “after a period of absence.” The amendments also impose a new, 30-day period of actual residency before would-be voters can register, although it’s unclear whether the changes will apply to existing registered voters. The one-day requirement to establish residency, meanwhile, remains the same.

Yet as Nanci Dixon’s piece underscores, at least some full-timing RVers clearly want it both ways—something a preponderance of more than a hundred commenting readers pointed out—by having a minimum of responsibilities and costs while obtaining as many privileges and rights as any other member of society. By getting a free ride, or at least as close to one as possible. By paying low taxes, or none at all, while benefitting from roads, police and fire services and all the other trappings of civil society, not just in South Dakota but in all the other states in which they don’t pay the freight. By voting without living with the consequences.

By fussing over jury duty, for which there apparently is no convenient schedule.

For full-time RVers, all this is part of the freedom of the road they’ve chosen over the heavy chain of social obligation that weighs down everyone else. For many members of that “everyone else,” however, that marks the full-timers as freeloaders, the grasshoppers having their day in the sun while the ants toil away against the coming winter. Nice work if you can get it—but is it reasonable to pout when the ants require a little contribution to the public weal? Shouldn’t the inconvenience be met with grace, out of recognition of the blessings that have been bestowed?