PROP 1: Too expensive, complicated, and disenfranchising

Prop 1 suggests major changes in Idaho elections.

The primary election ballot will list the names of all candidates. It will include next to the candidate’s name either a stated party affiliation or a stated designation of “nonpartisan” or “undeclared.” There is no assumption that the candidate has any actual alignment with a party philosophy. This essentially tells the voter nothing about how any given candidate may perform if elected.

In the general election you can pick one candidate, or you can rank as few as two or as many as four. Votes are then tabulated by computer in “rounds.” At the end of each round the candidate with the least votes is eliminated. If the eliminated candidate was your first choice, then your vote goes to your next choice. Because of eliminations and ballot mistakes, the more rounds the less likely any candidate will breach 50%. In an Alaska election using this system nearly 15,000 votes were discarded.

This new system will likely cost Kootenai County as much as $3 million. How will the county get that kind of extra money without raising taxes?

It also creates a vacuum in terms of grass roots candidate information so important to voters’ discernment. Big out of state money will be only too happy to help fill that vacuum.

Our county clerk will be unable to certify the election results. Vote Data will have to be transferred to a centralized computer system capable of the complex vote tabulation.

The ideas of proposition one are too expensive, too complicated and disenfranchising. They take away the grass roots process of developing candidate information so helpful to those wanting to cast an informed vote. Please vote no. 

WILLIAM GREEN 

Coeur d’Alene