Republican legislators try to make it harder to get initiatives on Idaho ballot — again

The great irony of a new bill to make ballot initiatives more difficult in Idaho is that it likely would cause the very situation it claims to prevent.

Because Senate Bill 1110 would require signatures from every district in the state of Idaho, the only people who would be able to get an initiative on the ballot would be large, well-funded special interest groups — the very groups that legislators like bill sponsor Sen. Steve Vick, R-Dalton Gardens, say they fear.

Specifically, well-heeled organizations that support big-money endeavors — marijuana legalization, for instance — would be the only ones able to deploy a force of signature gatherers large enough to cover every corner of the state.

Smaller, grass-roots organizations would find a harder time collecting signatures from all 35 of Idaho’s legislative districts.

Once again, Idaho’s Republican lawmakers are trying to legislate from a position of fear. This bill is in reaction to a fear that out-of-state, well-moneyed groups will spend millions of dollars in Idaho to trick Idaho voters into approving something like marijuana legalization.

Senate Bill 1110 would change the requirement for signatures from collecting 6% of registered voters in each of 18 legislative districts to 6% of registered voters in all 35 districts.

Idaho recently surpassed 1 million registered voters. With 35 legislative districts, each district will have, on average, 28,000 registered voters. But that number will vary wildly by districts, which are divided based on population, not registered voters.

To get an initiative on the ballot, organizers would need to collect about 1,700 signatures in each district.

That may seem like a low bar to clear, a point that was raised during testimony Wednesday in the Senate State Affairs committee, but requiring that many signatures in every single district raises the bar significantly from the current standard. Some argue it would be impossible, especially for smaller organizations or groups of Idaho citizens seeking their constitutional right to come forward with an initiative.

Also, the argument that rural voters are disenfranchised in the initiative process is suspect. Proponents of that stance say that one need to go to only four counties in the state to hit 18 legislative districts, so organizers could skip rural districts. However, any initiative that gets on the ballot must be approved by all voters in the state — including those rural voters.

As one person testified Wednesday, nearly every rural district in Idaho approved Medicaid expansion when it got on the ballot — much to the chagrin of majority Republicans in the Legislature, who have been trying ever since to make the initiative process more difficult. They passed two bills in 2019 putting in place more stringent restrictions, but Gov. Brad Little vetoed both.

Rural voters are not disenfranchised, because they have the ultimate say — on Election Day.

If anything, Senate Bill 1110 gives outsize power to rural districts, providing any one district — even the smallest one in the state — with complete veto power over the entire state. It is conceivable that organizers could get tens of thousands of signatures in 34 districts but not enough signatures in one district, causing the initiative to miss the ballot.

As it stands now, with 18 districts, organizers can pick and choose which districts to target for signatures. If an organizer thinks rural voters would support a specific initiative, that organizer could go only to rural districts to collect signatures, and skip the 13 districts in Ada and Canyon counties altogether.

Idaho’s initiative process is already difficult. In 2013, after Idaho voters overturned the Legislature’s controversial Students Come First laws by referendum, the Legislature tightened the rules for initiatives to what they are today. Since then, only two initiatives have made it to the ballot: Medicaid expansion, which passed, and a horse-racing gambling initiative, which failed. Both were on the same ballot.

The bottom line is that Senate Bill 1110 would make it unreasonably difficult for citizens to get an initiative on the ballot.

Idaho legislators should let the voters decide what initiatives to approve or reject. They shouldn’t be working to prevent initiatives from getting to the voters in the first place.