With all the voter suppression bills floating around the Idaho Legislature, you’d think a wave of absentee ballots flipped the state’s four electoral votes from Republican Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden.
No such thing happened. Trump carried Idaho by nearly 2-to-1.
The level of Republican angst on display in Boise might have you wondering if Republican Jim Risch lost his Senate seat to Democrat Paulette Jordan.
Nope. Risch trounced Jordan by more than 252,500 votes statewide.
So did a group of heretofore dormant Democratic mail-in ballots transform the complexion of Idaho’s Legislature?
No. If anything, that body has gone even further over to the deep end of the Republican pool.
Idaho just finished a major experiment in making voting more convenient. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it conducted an all-absentee ballot primary election in the spring and then a hybrid in-person and absentee general election. Turnout soared.
In the spring, more than 328,000 people voted — the largest number of ballots ever cast in such an election.
In the fall, turnout reached 81.2 percent of registered voters.
In spite of all that, reforms engineered by Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane and embraced by the Idaho Legislature produced one of the smoothest vote-counting operations across the country on Election Night.
What it also reinforced was that Idaho is a conservative Republican state. The greater the turnout, the better it is for conservatives and Republicans. The Idaho Freedom Foundation has a greater hold on the Legislature because more voters showed up in the primary and selected the more conservative GOP candidates as their nominees.
Idaho is that rare bird where depressed voter turnout — generally in the midterm elections — is where Democrats tend to make modest gains. Republicans have nothing to fear from encouraging more people to vote. But you’d never know it from the way the GOP lawmakers want to cull the herd:
l House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, R-Star, launched an assault on “ballot harvesting” — a problem that even Moyle admits has not occurred within the Gem State — by declaring “voting shouldn’t be easy.”
His scheme would charge anyone who collects and delivers more than six ballots from other family members with a felony. His earlier version imposed the limit at two ballots. It cleared the House Thursday on a party-line vote
If this has any effect at all, it’s going to cause headaches for housebound voters.
l Rep. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton, is behind a measure that would limit absentee balloting in presidential elections to overseas military and the physically disabled. Otherwise, only the in-person voting would count.
l Rep. Brandon Mitchell, R-Moscow, and Sen. Regina Bayer, R-Meridian, are sponsoring a bill that would disenfranchise any college student who relies on his student ID rather than a driver’s license at the polls. Likewise, more stringent reliance on a state driver’s license could work a hardship on people who recently moved into the state as well as anyone whose full name on his license does not match the election office’s records. Some election workers worry unresolved issues could result in voters being turned away from the polls.
l Both the Mitchell-Bayer bill and a separate piece of legislation promoted by Reps. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, and Julianne Young, R-Blackfoot, would ramp up state secretary of state auditing and scrutinizing of local election offices. All of this will cost the taxpayers more than $2 million.
Again, those homebound, student, newly arrived and non-driving Idahoans would vote Republican by and large if allowed the opportunity. But this is about Idaho giving the national GOP cover for a voter suppression movement that has become its mantra. Idaho is among 43 state legislatures promoting what the Brennan Center for Justice has inventoried at 253 new voter suppression bills.
It’s part of the big lie asserting that the election was stolen from former Donald President Trump, who conceded last fall that Democratic election reforms “had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Nothing new about that. Forty years ago, the late Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, acknowledged: “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Joining this national frenzy could explain why Idaho Republicans would punish Idaho Republicans who vote for Idaho Republicans in Idaho elections. But if this is how the Idaho Republican Legislature acts when it’s winning elections, how will it respond if the GOP ever lost? — M.T.
