OPINION: True cost of Prop 1

Do you want Idaho to spend $40 million on new electronic vote tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems? According to the Secretary of State, Phil McGrane, if Proposition 1 passes this may be our new reality. 

This November, you will be voting on Proposition 1, which is an initiative to eliminate our current primary and general elections and replacing them with an expensive, confusing, complicated and un-auditable jungle primary and a ranked choice general election. Prop 1 was falsely sold as an “Open Primary” initiative but the courts have found that forcing an open primary is unconstitutional and a violation of your right to free association.  

Currently, the political parties select their nominees to compete in the general election. This selection process can be a primary, or caucus, or in the case of the Democrat presidential candidate, a decision made by party bosses (Democracy? We don’t need no stinking democracy!) 

No matter the system, Democrats select their nominee, Republicans select their nominee, Libertarians select their nominee, etc. Much like the people in a town voting on who will be the mayor or voters in a county voting on who will be sheriff, it is the members of the party who vote for who will be their nominee. It wouldn’t make sense for the people in Coeur d’Alene to vote for the mayor of Boise or the people in Bonner County for vote for the Valley County sheriff. It doesn’t make sense for the Democrats to vote on who will be the Republican nominee, but that is what Prop 1 is trying to do.  

People have the fundamental right to freely associate, which includes the right to not associate. Those associations can set the parameters for membership as long as those parameters are not solely based on race, sex or other factors not related to the purpose of the association. A realtor association may require members be licensed realtors.  

To cancel your right to associate, the authors of Prop 1 want to eliminate all political associations for the election by having a jungle primary were any candidate can claim to be from any party, even if they are not. The top four vote getters move on to the ranked choice general election, where voters must rank each of the four candidates or risk not having their vote count at all.  

With Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) you must decide not only your favorite candidate but your second favorite, third favorite and least favorite. For the voter, it is four times the work because you must evaluate all the candidates in detail. It is easy to pick a favorite but picking a second and third favorite is a lot harder.  

Once the ballots are cast, they must scanned and sent to a central tabulation facility where they are downloaded into a computer. The computer tabulates all the first choices, but since it is a four-way race among popular candidates who won the jungle primary it is unlikely that any of them receives a majority of the votes. The computer then eliminates the candidate with the least votes and then tabulates again using the second choice on the ballots where the losing candidate was the first choice.  

This process will need to be done again if none of the candidates gets a majority, so now some of the ballots are using their first choice, some their second choice and some their third choice. If a ballot doesn’t have a second or third choice it could be “exhausted” and eliminated. No vote for you. 

Because which choice on a particular ballot is used depends on all the other ballots, the tabulation process needs to be done by a singular computer running a complex algorithm. All the ballots, or their scanned data, need to be delivered to the central processing location.  

Remember back in July when a minor programming error resulted in half the nation’s airlines being grounded? Small programming errors can cause massive problems. Wherever Ranked Choice Voting is used there are widespread voting errors, longer lines, discarded ballots, delayed election results and suspect recounts. There have even been cases where results are overturned weeks after the election. All problems result in further diminishing voter confidence.  

It gets worse. Because which vote gets counted depends on all the other ballots, it is impossible to do an audit at the precinct level. For statewide races all you can do is rerun the algorithm and get the same result. That is not an audit. You cannot assess the accuracy of a system by comparing it to itself.  

It gets even worse. There are only two vote tabulation system vendors that are certified in Idaho, Elections Systems & Software (ES&S) and Hart InterCivic (Hart). Neither system can process Ranked Choice Ballots. The vendors that can process RCV ballots are Clear Ballot Group and Dominion Voting Systems.  

If Prop 1 passes, ALL of Idaho’s 44 counties would need to scrap all their voting systems and replace them with Clear Ballot Group or Dominion Voting Systems hardware and software to the tune of $40,000,000 tax dollars. There is NO provision in Prop 1 to pay for this new equipment.  

But wait, it gets even worser. In Idaho it is forbidden for voting machines to be connected to the internet. How will the county vote tabulations make it to the central vote tabulator running the RCV software if it can’t be done electronically over the internet? Will the data be put on thumb drives and shipped to Boise? What if one gets lost, or stolen, or intercepted? 

Ranked Choice Voting is a convoluted and confusing system that is full of problems that will further erode public trust. Only two states have implemented RCV; Alaska and Maine, and Alaska is currently attempting to go back to the original one-man, one-vote system.  

Ranked Choice Voting is an expensive and dangerous “solution” to a problem we don’t have. Vote No to Ranked Choice Voting. Vote NO on Proposition 1 

It’s just common sense.  

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Brent Regan is chairman of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee.