The Idaho Open Primaries initiative explained

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

As its opening salvo in Idaho politics, Reclaim Idaho successfully gathered enough signatures to place a Medicaid expansion initiative onto the 2018 ballot, which reportedly allowed for more than 78,000 Idahoans who fell in a coverage gap to receive Medicaid coverage. The citizen-led initiative blew away many critics’ expectations, winning with almost 61% of the votes statewide.

The grassroots organization’s next effort, the Quality Education Act, was also on track for success, but ultimately pulled from the 2022 ballot by Reclaim Idaho because of a law passed in a special legislative session that would have doomed the initiative’s chance at passing just a month before the Nov. 8 vote. Organizers still credit this effort as a “win,” because Idaho legislators passed a law in its place that included more than $410 million earmarked to fund K-12 public education and career training.

Now, Reclaim Idaho has teamed up with a coalition of other state organizations to tackle one of the most contentious issues facing Idaho politics during the past dozen years: the closed Republican primary elections approved in 2011 and which critics claim put more power and influence in the hands of Idaho’s political parties and less in the hands of the voters.

The Reader sat down with District 1 volunteers Hal Gates and Judy Labrie to ask about the process, as well as clarify some commonly misunderstood details of the Open Primaries Initiative.

Open primaries vs. ranked choice

While these terms go hand in hand to form the initiative, it’s important to recognize what each means.

An open primary is just that: opening voting in any political party’s primary to all eligible registered voters, including those who are unaffiliated — a category that totals about 270,000 people in Idaho.

“In primaries, everyone gets the same ballot and you vote for one candidate,” said Labrie, who, along with Gates, has volunteered to collect signatures to help place the initiative on the  November 2024 ballot. 

If successful, it will be implemented in 2026 to allow county clerks to train staff on the new protocols. 

“The top four of the vote getters go onto the general election, where ranked-choice happens,” Labrie said. “Everybody gets the same ballot again, and this time you pick your first choice and have the option of a runner-up, as well as a third and fourth choice. You also will have the opportunity to write in a candidate.”

The candidate coming in last is removed from the race and the second choice picks are distributed from that losing ballot to the remaining ballots in an “instant runoff.” The process repeats itself until whichever of the two candidates left reaches a plurality of votes — over 50% — and is announced as the winner.

“Ultimately, we still just have one vote, but our one vote has more information in it with ranked choice voting,” Gates told the Reader. “The voter can say, ‘I want this person, but if this person doesn’t get a majority of votes, I’d be amenable to this person.’ … You can actually vote your conscience but still also vote for a candidate who can win and can represent you.”

“When I read about this, the districts and states that have used the system have found the candidates who are running lead a much cleaner, more civil campaign and they’re more sensitive to the voters, instead of just party affiliation,” Labrie said.

Gates pointed to the most recent state election, in which District 1 Sen. Scott Herndon beat incumbent Jim Woodward in the Republican primary and faced write-in candidate Steve Johnson in the general — the latter gathering a large portion of votes, but ultimately falling short of winning.

“If you look at who is pushing against this initiative, you should look at people who have won in low-turnout primaries to general elections, with races that aren’t representative of making a choice between two candidates,” Gates said. “Scott Herndon won with 19% of Bonner County’s registered voters. … That’s not the citizens picking their candidate, that’s him navigating this complicated system successfully.”

Herndon opposes the initiative, claiming that it would eliminate political parties in Idaho.

“The initiative does not ‘open the Republican primary,’” Herndon told the Reader in an email. “The initiative abolishes the Republican primary.”

Herndon claims that under the initiative, “party affiliation will no longer be relevant because the election is no longer a party nomination election. This initiative is bypassing the tradition and right of parties to choose nominees, standard bearers, to run in general elections. This tradition goes right back to the first years of the union after establishment of the United States.”

Herndon also opposes the ranked choice portion of the initiative, writing, “Because some voters won’t rank all candidates, they will lack participation in automatic subsequent rounds of voting. Therefore, ultimately, their voice will count less than another voter who is willing to compromise on other candidates.”

He also called ranked choice voting, “confusing,” claimed it would “create legal challenges” and would eliminate “people’s ability to include new information in their decision making before the next round of voting.”

Labrie pushed back on that idea.

“I think with open primaries, we’ll see a more diverse field of candidates,” she said. “Then, by ranking them, it also lets the voters have much more say in who is going to be representing them.”

One fear Labrie said she occasionally hears from critics is that it will “turn the state Democrat,” which she argues isn’t a serious complaint.

“This is a red state,” she said. “It’s not going to all of a sudden become Democrat-majority.”

Rather, Gates added, the initiative will likely make it harder for candidates who express more extreme views — whether on the right or left — to game the system in their favor by playing to their base during primaries and coasting through the general election in the fall.

“What you see is some of the candidates who are pushing more extreme views on the left or right start having more trouble getting over the top and getting elected because they have to build a coalition,” Gates said. “They can’t rely on primaries to weed out the viable competition for them.”

Labrie brought up some more progressive-leaning municipalities like San Francisco, which have embraced ranked choice voting and open primaries to accomplish the same goal of giving people the option to fairly choose among candidates, without those holding extreme views having an advantage during primaries.

“San Francisco went this route because of extreme people on the left,” Labrie said. “It was a push to bring everything back toward the center.”

Support from high places and the uptick of RINOs

The Idahoans for Open Primaries coalition is made up of numerous community groups and civic organizations throughout the state who support the effort. The coalition includes Veterans for Idaho Voters, Idaho Chapter of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, North Idaho Women, the Hope Coalition, Republicans for Open Primaries as well as Reclaim Idaho.

“The initiative has the support of over 100 noted Republicans in Idaho, including former Gov. Butch Otter,” Gates said.

Otter issued a statement that read, “The right to vote is one of the most precious rights that Americans have. Every registered voter should have the right to weigh in on choosing our leaders. Independents, including a lot of military veterans, have been excluded from having their say because of the closed GOP primary.”

Gates argued that because of Idaho’s large population of active duty military and veterans, hundreds of thousands of voters are not allowed to vote unless affiliated with a particular party.

“They have to align with the Republican Party if they want to participate in Idaho politics,” he said, adding that it’s common practice for many service members in Idaho to choose not to affiliate with one party or another.

Gates said the decision by the Idaho GOP to close primaries led to many registering as Republicans just to vote in the races that mattered, since unaffiliated ballots are often sparse or devoid of choices. The term “RINO,” or “Republican In Name Only,” has been used as a pejorative by the more extreme wing of the Republican Party, with members of the far-right Idaho Freedom Caucus claiming it’s not fair for voters to identify with a political party just because they want to vote.

“They made a rule that you had to be a Republican to participate in the process, so a lot of us did that,” Gates said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

“I don’t personally call people RINOs,” Herndon wrote. “The 270,000 people who are independent of a political party are free to affiliate with any one of the multiple political parties … or they can create new political parties with better platforms, or they can remain independent of any political party. … There is no reason Idaho has to be a uni-party state.”

Last summer, the Idaho GOP adopted a party platform filled with exclusionary rules that many prominent Republicans in Idaho claimed had further divided the party.

Among other actions, the Idaho GOP led by newly-elected Chairwoman Dorothy Moon, passed a rule that would make voters who switch their party affiliation to Republican wait up to two years or more before they are allowed to vote in a Republican primary election in Idaho. Many on both sides of the debate likened the adoption of the new party platform — including replacing former Chairman Tom Luna at their meeting in Challis — as a sort of “purge.” 

For Tracey Wasden, the president of the Idaho Federation of Republican Women, the move signaled an attack on the “big tent” idea of the Republican Party that aims to include multiple conservative viewpoints, not just a singular ideology.

“This is the party of the big tent; we need all voices there,” Wasden told the Idaho Capital Sun in August. “But in this party right now, they don’t want all voices heard. They only want to hear their voice. They only want the voices that believe the same as they believe. They do not want any voice that is not with them. This is about power. They want exclusive power here.”

Critics like Herndon and Moon have disagreed with that argument.

Moon wrote in a statement, “The Idaho GOP has had division for decades. However, right now, I feel that the party is the least divided it has been in years.”

“Arguably, changing to a top-four primary eliminates the need for a primary election altogether,” Herndon wrote in a statement this summer. “Since no political party nominees are chosen, the political parties become irrelevant, and the right of affiliation in the First Amendment is nullified.”

The coalition volunteers rejected those claims.

“Parties can still endorse their favorite candidates,” Labrie explained. “They won’t lose that ability.”

“It’s a constitutional right to have a party affiliation,” Gates said, but said actions like the Citizens United case allows people to, “pour as much money into any candidate they want. … We want to put the Idaho political power back in the hands of Idaho voters where it belongs. … If the far right had the majority of support, then under that system they would still succeed and the system would work as it was designed.”

Labrie emphasized the importance of opening primaries recounting a story she recently heard from a schoolteacher.

“One of the teacher’s students turned 18 and went to vote, but they got a ballot that didn’t have anything on it,” Labrie said. “The student didn’t want to join a political party, but he asked where all the candidates were on the ballot because he wanted to vote. He was told, ‘You’re unaffiliated and this is the ballot you get.’ Sadly, he never bothered to vote again. We’ve got a lot of people in that category and that gives us hope.”

“Most Idaho voters aren’t far-right or far-left, they’re concerned with cost of living, protecting public lands, making sure we have good public schools and health care, that we drive on safe roads,” Gates added. “They’re regular voters. We want a political system that brings them into the process and elects candidates who speak to the vast middle of the political spectrum where most people reside.”

Signature gathering continues

The coalition needs to gather a total of 6% of the eligible registered voters in Idaho, which amounts to around 63,000, as well as 6% of registered voters in 18 of Idaho’s voting districts to make the general election ballot. Currently, 1,477 signatures have been approved from Bonner County with another 250 yet to be turned in from Boundary County. The threshold to reach in District 1 is just shy of 2,000 signatures, which is rapidly approaching.

“We’re close to qualifying, but we’re not going to quit getting more signatures,” Labrie said. “Our efforts are not going to stop the moment we qualify. This is an arduous process and it’s a popular initiative. It’s so popular, over 1,000 people have volunteered around the state to gather signatures.”

The coalition has until April 30, 2024 to turn in petitions, with the expectation that some signatures will be denied for various reasons.

“The signature gathering process is continual,” Gates said. “You’ll see people with clipboards at a lot of different events. With the holidays ramping up, you’ll see them more often, for example when people line up for the Panida events.”

The only requirement to sign the petition is for the signer to be a registered voter in Idaho.

With petitions reaching their quotas around the state, the Idaho Open Primaries coalition is far from celebrating yet. Volunteers like Gates and Labrie continue to put their heads down and work to garner support for the initiative, which, if successful, could potentially affect Idaho politics more than any other move since 2011. 

“We don’t do politics just to have arguments,” Gates said. “We do these kinds of things because we can implement change that will benefit everybody.”

Vanderford’s Books and Stationary has an Idaho Open Primaries petition available for signers during normal business hours. To learn more about the initiative, visit reclaimidaho.org.