Should you sign the petition to get open primaries initiative on the ballot in Idaho? | Opinion
The list of Idaho Republicans lining up in favor of open primaries just got a lot longer — and a lot more prominent.
Former Idaho Gov. Butch Otter and his wife, Lori Otter, have thrown their support behind a proposed ballot initiative that would allow Idaho voters to decide whether the state has open primary elections. Currently, the Idaho Republican Party has a closed primary, meaning only registered Republicans may participate.
The Otters were the featured attraction at a press conference Wednesday at which the group Open Primaries for Idaho declared support from 116 Republicans, including some big names — former House Speaker Bruce Newcomb, former Sen. and Lt. Gov. Jack Riggs and former Rep. Maxine Bell among them.
In addition to creating an open primary, open to all candidates regardless of party, the initiative would also create a “top four” primary election, in which the top four vote-getters advance to the general election.
Once in the general election, voters would rank candidates in their preferred order, according to previous Statesman reporting. A few other states have this same ranked-choice system.
A candidate who collects more than 50% of first-place votes wins the election. But if no candidate reaches that threshold, a runoff count is triggered. The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and their votes are reallocated to the candidate listed second. That process repeats until a candidate surpasses 50%.
We won’t weigh in yet on whether to support the initiative. We’ll save that for if and when it gets on the ballot in November 2024.
But we do recommend that you sign the petition to get it on the ballot. That way, Idaho voters can decide for themselves whether it’s a good idea or not.
Closed primaries, initiative supporters argue, allow extremist candidates to win races with tiny percentages of voters.
They cite recent losses by Sens. Jim Woodward, Jim Patrick, Jeff Agenbroad and Carl Crabtree, and Reps. Scott Syme, Jim Addis, Greg Chaney and Paul Amador, noting that far-right candidates won their seats with votes from less than 10% of registered voters in their district.
In addition, they argue, closing the Republican primary – which nearly always decides the eventual officeholder in heavily conservative Idaho – disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of unaffiliated voters.
The most recent voter registration numbers show 272,000 unaffiliated voters in Idaho — or 27% of the total.
Opening the primaries, supporters argue, would allow those unaffiliated voters to have a say in the primary election.
Supporters also argue that opening the primary would lead to more civility, as broadening the base of potential voters would weed out extremist, pugilistic candidates and temper messages that would need to appeal to a wider range of voters.
These are compelling arguments in a state that’s seen a hijacking of the Republican Party by the far right, and the resulting election of some of these candidates through the closed primary system.
Make no mistake: This is a problem within the Idaho Republican Party, which has been taken over by extremists.
Certainly, the so-called traditional Republicans, represented by the Otters and others on the list of open primary supporters, could solve the problem simply by taking back their party from the fringe.
Barring that, though, the open primaries initiative just might be the next best solution.
At the very least, it’s worth considering, so it’s worth putting on the ballot.
Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members Mary Rohlfing and Patricia Nilsson.
