South Dakota's statewide smoking ban could go into effect after all and before the November 2010 election. The Tobacco Free Kids Network filed paperwork with the Secretary of State's office late Thursday afternoon contesting the petition to bring the smoking ban to a vote. They claim nearly 10,000 of the 25,000 signatures smoking ban opponents turned in are not valid. 

The South Dakota Tobacco Free Kids Network reviewed every page of the petition, more than one thousand, line by line over the past five days. It says it found many of those signatures do not belong to registered voters and that 39 percent are not valid.  If the Secretary of State agrees with them, the smoking ban may not appear on next year's ballot.

"It's a very painstaking process and that requires you to be very deliberate and thorough and detail oriented," Darrin Smith with the American Heart Association said.

Smith was one of a dozen people who combed through the signatures until late Wednesday night. 

"But we just felt strongly that we owed it to the people of South Dakota that we know support this law very strongly. The hundreds of thousands of volunteers who supported us through the legislative session," Smith said.

Supporters of the ban are challenging the petition because they say it's too costly to sit back and wait until November 2010 for the smoke-free law to take effect.

"We know that just in terms of heart attack hospitalizations, the state of South Dakota will save $23 million the first year. We know there will be hundreds, possibly thousands of lives impacted by the law going into effect immediately versus delayed for even 16 or 17 months," Smith said.

But they will have to wait several weeks for the Secretary of State to decide whether the signatures being challenged will be thrown out.

"We feel the Secretary of State's office will agree with the evidence we're submitting and the smoke-free law will hopefully go into effect for all South Dakotans sooner rather than later," Smith said.