A 2024 ballot measure seeking to implement ranked-choice voting (RCV) in Idaho violates state law, a lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges.
Filed by Attorney General Raúl Labrador, the legal petition requests the Idaho Supreme Court invalidate a statute proposal set to appear on the Gem State’s November ballot that would abolish party primaries and institute RCV for general elections. Candidates of all parties would be forced to run in a single primary, in which the “top four vote-earners” would advance to the RCV-run general election, according to Ballotpedia.
The proposed ballot measure would effectively negate a law passed last year by the Idaho Legislature barring the use of RCV.
Under ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates of all parties in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.
Labrador argues that Idahoans for Open Primaries, the ballot measure’s primary supporter, employed “misleading” language and practices when gathering signatures for the initiative by referring to the sought-after system as an “open primary.”
The attorney general claims defendants did this in spite of a ruling on the initiative by the high court last year. In that decision, the court’s majority instructed Labrador to rewrite his original title for the initiative and noted, as Labrador also does in the suit, that the measure’s use of the term
