BOISE, Idaho — In November, Idahoans will have the chance to vote on changing our elections, as an initiative has made it to the ballot. However, a lawsuit has been filed to have it removed before it's printed on a ballot.
Idaho's current primary voting allows political parties to close their primary - something the republican party has chosen to do. This is a system that Idahoans for Open Primaries said is leaving a large group of people out.
"We want to give every voter the right to participate in every taxpayer funded election," Luke Mayville with Idaho for Open Primaries told KTVB Thursday. "And we also want to give voters better choices when they show up to vote."
Although the initiative received enough signatures and received the stamp of approval from the Secretary of State, Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State's Office to remove the Open Primaries Initiative from the Nov. 24 ballot.
How does the process work?
The initiative proposes a non-partisan primary election, where the top four vote-getters - regardless of political party - would advance to the general election.
The general election would have instant runoff voting, often referred to as ranked-choice voting. Voters would choose their top candidate and rank the remaining candidates in order of preference.
If no candidate wins with more than 50% of the vote after the first-choice rankings are counted, then the last-place candidate would be eliminated, and each vote for that candidate would go to the voter's second choice. That process would repeat until one candidate gets at least 50% of the vote and is declared the winner.
Clashing Ideas
Labrador has two problems with the initiative.
"In my opinion, they deceive the public by calling it an open primary," Labrador told KTVB Thursday. "But they also deceived the public when they didn't talk about the two parts of the initiative."
In the lawsuit Labrador alleges volunteers who explained the initiative while they were collecting signatures, provided a "lack of information," about the initiative.
Something Mayville said is not true.
"The claim that volunteers who are collecting signatures somehow deceived the public... It's a baseless claim," Mayville said. "It's frankly insulting to the thousands of ordinary Idahoans who spent hours of their time talking to their neighbors talking to their friends about this initiative. People worked hard to collect these signatures. And they discussed every aspect of this initiative very carefully."
Mayville said the Idahoans for Open Primaries group feels Labrador is interfering with the election.
"We do not believe this lawsuit is going to be taken seriously by the court," Mayville said.
When asked why, Mayville said: "At the heart of it, there is nothing unconstitutional about giving all voters the right to participate."
Labrador said he's just following the law.
"My duty and my responsibility as the Attorney General of the State of Idaho is to ensure that the laws are followed in the state of Idaho, and that's what I'm doing with this lawsuit," he said.
This isn't the first legal battle between the Attorney General and the Idahoans for Open Primaries
Last Summer, Labrador was sued by the group over the ballot title he gave the initiative, it is his job and the secretary of states to do so.
In the end, the Supreme Court asked Labrador to change it.