by Logan Finney, Idaho Reports
As ordered by the Idaho Supreme Court, Attorney General Raúl Labrador has submitted revised ballot titles for a voter initiative that proposes to overhaul the state’s primary and general election systems.
The new short title replaces “nonparty blanket primary” with “top-four primary” and inserts “system” after ranked choice voting, addressing the major concerns justices voiced in Thursday’s opinion.
In addition to the revisions above, the long title clarifies that voters “need not rank every candidate” in the proposed ranked choice voting system and that “votes for an eliminated candidate will transfer to the voter’s next-highest-ranked active candidate” rather than saying they would not be counted.
“Please let me know if my office can be of further service to the Court,” Labrador wrote in a letter accompanying the changes.
Idahoans for Open Primaries organizers had petitioned the court to use their suggested ballot titles, which refer to the system as an “open primary,” but the justices declined to do so because Idaho has used an open primary system in the past different than what is proposed in the initiative.
Read the full submission from Labrador’s office below.
Logan Finney | Producer
Logan Finney is a North Idaho native with a passion for media production and boring government meetings. He grew up skiing, hunting and hiking in the mountains of Bonner County and has maintained a lifelong interest in the state’s geography, history and politics. Logan joined the Idaho Reports team in 2020 as a legislative session intern and stayed to cover the COVID-19 pandemic. He was hired as an associate producer in 2021 and they haven’t been able to get rid of him since.