The campaign to bring a top-four primary to Idaho won a largely favorable verdict on Thursday when the state Supreme Court unanimously rejected the ballot summary crafted by far-right Attorney General Raúl Labrador and ordered him to issue a new one. However, the deadline for Idahoans for Open Primaries to turn in signatures to get its initiative on the November 2024 ballot will remain May 1 after the court declined the group's request to extend it.
The plan under consideration would replace Idaho's partisan primaries with the same type of system that was pioneered in Alaska in 2022. All candidates, regardless of party, would compete in one primary, and the four contenders with the most votes would advance to an instant-runoff general election. The measure would apply to races for Congress, the governorship and other statewide offices, the legislature, and county posts, though it would not impact presidential elections or contests for judicial office.
Labrador, though, wants to preserve the status quo that has benefited Republican hardliners like himself. "Let's defeat these bad ideas coming from liberal outside groups," he tweeted in May. The attorney general, who spent his four terms in the U.S. House as one of the most prominent tea party shit-talkers, was tasked with writing the summary that voters will see on their ballots, and he produced language that so displeased organizers they immediately filed a suit to challenge it.
In particular, IOP objected to Labrador's contention that their plan would "replace voter selection of party nominees with nonparty blanket primary." The conservative Supreme Court proved sympathetic. Justice Colleen Zahn, who crafted the court's opinion, wrote that the phrase "nonparty blanket primary" seems to be "one of the attorney general’s own creation" and could hurt the initiative's chances.
Zahn noted that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 struck down an electoral system in California that had commonly been referred to as a "partisan blanket primary." "Using an undefined term that is very similar to, but slightly different from those discussed by the Supreme Court could cause a voter to conclude that the system proposed in the Initiative has been or would be held to be unconstitutional, when in fact it has not," explained Zahn.
That now-defunct system, which Golden State voters approved in 1996, required all of the candidates to run together on a single ballot, with only the top vote-getter from each party advancing to the general election. But the U.S. Supreme Court determined four years later that it violated the parties' First Amendment rights of association because it forced them to allow their nominees to be chosen by "those who, at best, have refused to affiliate with the party, and, at worst, have expressly affiliated with a rival." (Voters adopted California's familiar top-two primary system in 2010.)
During oral arguments, Justice Robyn Brody had suggested that Labrador was using the words "blanket primary" because they've been used to describe practices in California and Washington, two blue states that Idaho conservatives love to rail against. "Doesn’t that drive home the point that the petitioners are making here," she asked, "which is you’re dooming this to failure before it even gets out of the blocks?"
Plaintiffs did not earn a complete victory, however. The court determined that state law doesn't give it the power to extend the signature-gathering deadline past May 1, which was unwelcome news to IOP. "We’ve lost about five weeks," said its attorney, "and in the summer, an essential season." The coalition needs to turn in about 63,000 signatures―a figure representing 6% of Idaho's registered voters—and organizers must also collect a sufficient number of signatures in at least 18 of Idaho's 35 legislative districts.
It would only take a simple majority of voters to approve the initiative, but that likely wouldn't be the end of the battle. While a win would repeal a law the legislature passed earlier this year to bar ranked-choice voting, the Idaho Capital Sun notes that legislative Republicans could try to pass a new bill to repeal it all over again.