Stapilus: Idahoans can ensure choices aren't co-opted by a few
At the end of a long road to ballot qualification, Idahoans will get to decide whether all the voters, or only a tiny sliver of them, will pick the leaders of its government going forward.
That’s the core of what’s really a simple proposition. There is no lack of efforts to confuse and distract, of course, from what the open primaries initiative actually would do; confusion and distraction are just about the best tools the opposition has.
For example, this from an op-ed by Morgan McGill of the Idaho Family Policy Center (a pro-Republican group): “Through open primaries, Democrats will slowly take greater control over Gem State politics as they build a coalition with more moderate or ‘squishy’ Republican candidates that can flip seats historically held by more conservative Republican candidates.”
The sense of that falls apart when you recognize that the initiative would not change the people of Idaho or their candidates either. It simply would bring more people into the process of selecting their leaders. The only rational reason for opposing the initiative is if you think that’s a bad idea, as a good many people in current state Republican leadership clearly do.
So how does it work?
There are two steps, one at the primary election, one at the general.
At the primary, instead of a convoluted system of trying to figure out which Idaho voters can vote for what, the answer would be this: Everyone (who is a qualified voter) gets to vote for everything. For instance: If there are five people — say, three Republicans, one Democrat and an independent — running for the state Senate seat where you live, you vote for whichever one you prefer. When the votes are tallied, the four candidates who get the most votes go on to November.
In November, once again you get to vote for whichever of the four you prefer — but you also can make another choice, if you want to: You can indicate the candidate who is your second choice (if your first choice doesn’t win), and your third choice (if neither of the top two come out on top). This is the “ranked choice” system, the terminology of which has tangled a lot of understanding about what’s really a pretty simple process.
The idea is that a candidate should have to get more than half of the vote to be elected. (Many of Idaho’s cities operate on this principle in their elections,and mayoral runoffs are not rare.)
This would mean that the people who are supposed to be in charge in this state — the voters, all who choose to participate — would get a voice in selecting their leaders. As it is now, because of the convoluted system governing party elections, only a small fraction do.
That’s it. Nothing terribly hard to understand about it.
What would be the effect? State Republican Chair Dorothy Moon wrote July 3, “In a winner-take-all election, the candidate with the most votes wins—the candidate that the most voters want. However, in an RCV election, the winner is the candidate a majority can tolerate. This shifts the focus, incentivizing candidates to avoid taking strong stands on issues.”
That’s one way of putting it: A move toward leadership by the broadly acceptable rather than bitter extremes. Here’s another: Wins under the open primary system would go to whoever has the most support among the most voters — as opposed to (in the current setup) whoever gets the backing of a small in-group, often a tiny fraction of the voters. Or: Do you want leadership representative of most of us, or of just a few of us?
Of course, looking ahead, all this depends too on the Idaho Legislature. Initiatives pass laws just as the legislature does, but just as no legislature can bind a later one, the legislature can change — or repeal completely — any initiative passed by the voters. Given how little regard the Idaho Legislature has had in recent years for the voters, the open primary law — if voters do pass it — may have a shaky future.
In the meantime, Idaho voters have a decision to make, about whether they want to be respected as vital participants in a system of self-governance. Or not.
