Suddenly, Idaho Republicans are OK with violating ‘one person, one vote’ | Opinion

Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, sponsor of a bill that would allow the state’s Attorney General to investigate elected city officials accused of committing a crime.

During the debate over whether to approve Proposition 1, the citizens initiative that would have opened Idaho’s primaries and established ranked choice voting, many of the opponents decried the measure as a violation of the “one person, one vote” principle.

The argument was dishonest, as every single voter would have the exact same opportunity to cast a ballot for one candidate. Under ranked choice voting, in addition, every voter has the same opportunity to choose their second, third and fourth choice, similar to a system of a runoff election.

At the top of the list of opponents was the Idaho Republican Party, namely Idaho GOP chairwoman Dorothy Moon, House Speaker Mike Moyle and Gov. Brad Little.

“(Ranked choice voting) ... eliminates Idaho’s traditional ‘one person, one vote’ elections,” Moyle wrote in a guest opinion piece.

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“This expensive, complicated, and unnecessary scheme eliminates the time-tested ‘one person, one vote’ method of electing candidates,” Moon wrote in a statement.

The rest of the rank and file of the Republican Party fell lockstep in line, as Proposition 1 went down in flames, 70% to 30%.

But now, all of a sudden, Republican legislators, who were once so indignant at the thought of violating “one person, one vote,” want to violate that principle when it comes to a citizen initiative.

As the Idaho Statesman’s Ian Max Stevenson reported, a group of Idaho Republican lawmakers hopes to make it harder to pass citizen-led ballot initiatives, with a bill from Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, that would raise the threshold to pass a ballot initiative to 60% from its current simple majority requirement.

This would be a clear violation of the “one person, one vote.”

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With a 60% requirement to pass a ballot initiative, that means a person who votes “no” has a higher weighted vote than a person who votes “yes.”

In other words, it would take nearly two “yes” votes for every “no” vote to pass a ballot initiative under the bill.

One-person, one-vote is a legal rule that one person’s voting power ought to be roughly equivalent to another person’s within the same state, according to an analysis from the Cornell Law School.

It’s rooted in the concept of equal protection under the law, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, and requires that each person be treated equally in their voting power.

Idaho already violates “one person, one vote” when it comes to requiring a supermajority to pass a bond measure, resulting in majorities voting for school bonds to fix their schools but still losing at the ballot because it failed to get 66.7% of the vote.

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Skaug’s bill also violates that tried and true principle of “majority rules.”

We elect our legislators with a simple majority. We even pass constitutional amendments with a simple majority.

Ironically, Skaug’s bill would require only a majority of legislative votes to pass. Perhaps his bill should have to get 60% approval.

Finally, can Republicans just give up on this obsession with taking away the constitutionally protected power of the citizens?

For years, the Republican-controlled Legislature has tried to limit the ability for citizens to get an initiative on the ballot.

The Idaho Supreme Court in 2021 issued a scathing ruling that overturned the Legislature’s ill-advised law that would have made it nearly impossible to get a citizens initiative on the ballot.

“Ultimately, the effect of SB 1110 is to prevent a perceived, yet unsubstantiated fear of the ‘tyranny of the majority,’ by replacing it with an actual ‘tyranny of the minority,’ ” according to the ruling. “This would result in a scheme that squarely conflicts with the democratic ideals that form the bedrock of the constitutional republic created by the Idaho Constitution, and seriously undermines the people’s initiative and referendum powers enshrined therein.”

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With such a beatdown, Republican legislators are now trying a different approach. If they can’t limit what gets on the ballot, they’re trying to make it harder for an initiative to pass.

If Idaho Republicans pass Skaug’s bill, it will show that their loyalty to the “one person, one vote” principle wasn’t really about protecting voters’ rights. It’s always about protecting their power.

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Statesman editorials are the 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 Greg Lanting, Terri Schorzman and Garry Wenske.