ELECTIONS: An interesting anomaly

What I like about North Idaho is, among other things, it is a hotbed of political activity. We heard recently from Todd Messenger of Kendig Keast Collaborative, LLC, the alleged land planning guru, that he never saw a group of people who trusted their government less than those in Kootenai County. Amen.

This year’s primary election was different than any in Idaho’s history. We had two firsts — the first presidential caucus and the first closed Republican Party primary. The conventional wisdom is that political parties are private organizations and can limit those who participate in their elections, hence the newly closed GOP primary.

One would think in restricting the voters in the GOP primary to like-minded party members, that we would have more uniform results. This was not the case in this year’s primary. Instead we had very divergent results between the absentee voting and the election day results. We also had a renegade precinct, No. 16 that voted very differently from surrounding precincts (as well as from what it had in prior elections). However, one would think neighboring precincts would vote similarly.

If anyone has an explanation of why with a more uniformed electorate we had more divergent results, I would like to hear it.

JUSTIN COTTRELL

Hayden