OPINION: The real cost of Prop 1

Do you want Idaho to spend $40 million on new electronic vote tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems? According to Secretary of State Phil McGrane, if Proposition 1 is approved, this may be our new reality.

In November, you will vote on Proposition 1, which is an initiative to eliminate the current primary and general election and replace it with an expensive, confusing, complicated, and unauditable jungle primary and ranked-choice general election. Prop 1 was falsely sold as an “Open Mayor” initiative, but the courts have found that forcing an open mayor is unconstitutional and a violation of your right to free association.

Currently, political parties select their candidates to contest in general elections. This selection process can be a primary, or caucus, or, in the case of the Democratic presidential candidate, a decision made by party bosses (Democracy? We don’t need a stinking democracy!)

Regardless of the system, Democrats select their candidate, Republicans select their candidate, Libertarians select their candidate, etc. Just like the people of a city who vote for mayor or the voters of a county who vote for sheriff, it is the members of the party who vote for their nominee. It wouldn’t make sense for the people of Coeur d’Alene to vote for the mayor of Boise or the people of Bonner County to vote for the sheriff of Valley County. It doesn’t make sense for Democrats to vote on who the Republican nominee will be, but that’s what Prop 1 is trying to do.

People have the fundamental right to associate freely, which includes the right not to associate. Those associations may set the parameters for membership, as long as those parameters are not based solely on race, sex, or other factors unrelated to the purpose of the association. An association of real estate agents may require members to be licensed real estate agents.

To nullify your right to association, the authors of Prop 1 want to eliminate all political associations for elections by holding jungle primaries where any candidate can claim to be from any party, even if they are not. The top four vote-getters advance to the general election, where voters must rank each of the four candidates or risk having their vote not count at all.

With ranked choice voting (RCV) you have to decide not only your favorite candidate, but also your second favorite, third favorite and least favorite. For the voter, it’s four times the work because you have to evaluate all the candidates in detail. It’s easy to pick a favorite, but picking a second and third favorite is much harder.

Once the ballots are cast, they must be scanned and sent to a central tabulation facility where they are downloaded into a computer. The computer tabulates all the first choices, but since it’s a race of four popular candidates who won the jungle primary, it’s unlikely that any one of them will get a majority of the vote. The computer then eliminates the candidate with the fewest votes and then tabulates again using the second choice on the ballots where the losing candidate was the first choice.

This process will have to be repeated if neither candidate gets a majority, so now some of the ballots use the first choice, some the second choice and some the third choice. If a ballot does not have a second or third option, it could be “exhausted” and discarded. No vote for you.

Because the choice used for a particular ballot depends on all other ballots, the tabulation process must be performed by a single computer running a complex algorithm. All ballots or their scanned data must be delivered to the central processing location.

Remember back in July when a minor scheduling error grounded half the country’s airlines? Small programming errors can cause massive problems. Wherever ranked-choice voting is used, there are widespread voting errors, longer lines, discarded ballots, delayed election results and dodgy recounts. There have even been cases where the results are overturned weeks after the election. All the problems result in a further decline in voter confidence.

It gets worse. Because the vote being counted depends on all the other ballots, it is impossible to audit at the polling station level. For state races all you can do is run the algorithm again and get the same result. This is not an audit. You cannot judge the accuracy of a system by comparing it to itself.

It gets even worse. There are only two vote tabulation system vendors that are certified in Idaho, Elections Systems & Software (ES&S) and Hart InterCivic (Hart). No system can process ranked-choice ballots. Vendors that can process RCV ballots are Clear Ballot Group and Dominion Voting Systems.

If Proposition 1 is approved, ALL 44 Idaho counties would have to abandon all of their voting systems and replace them with Clear Ballot Group or Dominion Voting Systems hardware and software at a cost of $40,000,000 in tax dollars. There is no provision in Prop 1 to pay for this new equipment.

But wait, it gets worse. Idaho prohibits voting machines from being connected to the Internet. How will the tabulation of county votes end up in the central vote tabulator running the RCV software if it cannot be done electronically over the Internet? Will the data be entered on thumb drives and shipped to Boise? What if one is lost, stolen or intercepted?

Ranked-choice voting is a complicated and confusing system, full of problems that will further erode public trust. Only two states have implemented RCV; Alaska and Maine and Alaska are currently trying to return to the original one-man-one-vote system.

Ranked Choice Voting is an expensive and dangerous “solution” to a problem we don’t have. Vote No on ranked choice voting. Vote NO on Proposition 1

It’s just common sense.

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Brent Regan is the chairman of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee.