Idaho
Ballot Security
What Politicians Say
Some Republicans in the state have pushed for major overhauls of election laws but those efforts have mostly fallen short.
The state House passed a bill that would have made sweeping changes to election laws but it died in the Senate. The sponsor, state Rep. Dorothy Moon – who made unfounded claims that Canadians were crossing the border to vote in Idaho – narrowly lost her race for the GOP nomination for Secretary of State.
Republican Governor Brad Little has signed into law a number of smaller changes to state elections laws.
Ease of Voting
The biggest change in Idaho elections law was a 2021 bill that made it more difficult to get initiatives and referendums on the ballot by requiring backers to get signatures from a broader geographic area of the state.
In a letter to the legislature, Little said the measure was necessary to keep initiatives from getting on the ballot after only getting signatures from the state’s bigger cities.
Another bill specifies that if a mail-in voter needs a new ballot to vote in a primary because the original was lost or damaged, it has to be for the same party primary as the original.
Ballot Security
Other legislation enacted since 2020 requires local elections administrators to verify voter signatures on petitions and provides for more training on signature verification; bars public colleges from offering students extra credit for voting or attempting to influence how they vote; and bans private donations to run elections, such as the grants the state received from Meta Platforms Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in 2020.
Read More: Zuckerberg’s Election Aid Spurs GOP Drive in 30 States to Ban It
How Politicians Responded to the 2020 Election
Idaho did not back the Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the 2020 election, but Republican attorney general nominee Raúl Labrador says he would have supported it if he were in office.
Representatives Russ Fulcher and Mike Simpson signed an amicus brief in support of the Texas lawsuit. Fulcher also objected to the certification of Biden electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania.