Category Archives: Idaho

Editorial: ‘Voting shouldn’t be easy’? Idaho’s laws shouldn’t be based on rumors, Trump’s ‘big lie’ | Idaho Statesman

Idaho held two successful elections in 2020. One of them was an all-mail ballot in the May primary and the other was the November presidential election, in which more than a half-million people voted by mail, turnout was a record and Idaho surpassed 1 million registered voters for the first time. So why, now, do some Republican Idaho legislators want to mess with success? “You know what? Voting shouldn’t be easy,” Rep. Mike Moyle, R-Star, said on the House floor Thursday in pitching a bill that would make so-called “ballot harvesting” a felony. It’s hard to believe, but several Idaho Republican legislators are trying to pass laws to make it harder to vote. “Ballot harvesting,” despite its ominous-sounding name, is the practice of collecting and delivering ballots on behalf of someone else. In opposition to Moyle’s bill, some legislators, Republican and Democratic, testified to ballot harvesting themselves or having their kids harvest ballots in their households. In defending his bill, Moyle cited a 2018 North Carolina case in which a Republican operative had tampered with ballots in a congressional race that was won by the Republican candidate and was subsequently overturned. Note: The perpetrator was caught and prosecuted under the state’s existing laws. Further, what he did wrong was not “ballot harvesting”; it was tampering with the ballots. But we have noticed something else about the debate: It’s based on unfounded fears, rumors and ultimately, Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Full Article: Idaho voting bills based on rumors and Trump’s ‘big lie’ | Idaho Statesman

Idaho: Ada County Election’s Office purchases almost half a million dollar ballot-sorting machine | Nicole Camarda/KIVI

With almost 144,000 absentee ballots already mailed, Ada County sent out their own record number of mail-in ballots for this year’s November election. Ada County purchased a machine to help with the sorting and signature verifications of absentee ballots. The almost half a million dollar Bluecrest ballot-sorting machine, nicknamed “Bessie,” allows the Ada County election’s office to scan in mail-in ballots as soon as they arrive. “It takes a picture of everyone’s signature that we then cross verify with our system,” Ada County elections director Saul Seyler says. Once the signatures are verified, the ballots will get re-run, and the machine will alert to anything that wasn’t adequately verified or causes of concerns.

Idaho: Error left tax-paying Boise residents off city voter rolls | Hayley Harding/Idaho Statesman

Blue Valley Mobile Home Park, a community of about 900 people in Boise’s far southeast corner, was annexed into the city in 2014. But when it came to city elections, Blue Valley voters were disenfranchised. A clerical error kept about 150 voters off the city voting rolls in the 2015 city election and 190 in the 2017 election, according to county Elections Director, even though property owners were paying city taxes by then. Voters in Blue Valley were added to city rolls in June, Levine said Wednesday, after Blue Valley residents realized what had happened and complained. He said officials are looking into how the problem occurred and who is responsible. One resident, Jennifer Wiley, told the Statesman that she went to her polling place to vote in the 2015 mayoral race just to be turned away. An Idaho Statesman reporter who reviewed voting rolls was unable to find a single Blue Valley address on more than a hundred pages of voting rolls for November city elections in those years — the first two elections in which Blue Valley residents should have been able to vote. Blue Valley, along with other homes near the neighborhood, is assigned to Precinct 1803 in Ada County. When Wiley got to her polling place, poll workers told her she wasn’t eligible to vote in the city election.