Idaho’s loose bond election laws need repair

It has been a rough month for democracy in North Idaho.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing over the fact that voter participation in the recent election represented a dispiriting 21 percent of the electorate – and this despite hotly contested elections, engaging candidates and clearly defined, starkly different visions of how to address pressing problems. And a “nonpartisan” Coeur d’Alene City Council election took on a partisan tone with possible ominous implications for future city elections.

But most significantly, a local school district took every advantage offered by flawed Idaho laws on school elections to ensure a positive result in a bond election at the cost of long-term voter trust.

For those who did not notice, the Lakeland School District trustees held a bond election a stunning 21 days before the just-concluded, long-scheduled and widely anticipated county election. Regardless of the motive for the move, the consequences of the decision can now be fully quantified.

According to the Kootenai County Elections Department and Lakeland School District, Kootenai County voter precincts 1 through 13 – not including Precinct 8 (effectively Lakeland School District) – reported wide disparities in voter participation rates between the highly publicized county election and the unheralded school bond election. Turnout for the bond election was 35 percent lower than the already abysmal county rate.

Of course the scheduling of elections is only one of many methods that Idaho school boards are given to tweak the outcome of bond issues. In the recent Lakeland election, for example, polling places were moved from the established county locations to nearby schools, where electioneering for defeat of the bond is prohibited by law, but bond boosterism was less evident than pervasive.

Curiously, those “moved” polling places represented the only increased voter turnout clusters.

Additionally, votes were counted by district employees in private and the method for requesting absentee ballots was cumbersome by comparison to streamlined county methods. (Absentee voting in the county represented 20 percent of total votes counted; in the school district, a mere 2 percent.)

None of this is meant as an indictment of the Lakeland School District in relation to any other school district; nor is this a commentary on the relative merits of the recent bond. The example is provided to illustrate a point. While Idaho remains one of the very few states to place the burden of new school construction almost entirely on the backs of local property owners, the Idaho Legislature has thrown the districts a bone in the form of “special” conditions governing bond elections. These dispensations do allow the districts to raise money a bit more easily, but, as the numbers clearly indicate, at the price of citizen participation.

As a longtime resident of the Lakeland School District, I once took pride in the unbroken string of bond levy support. I rather smugly pointed it out to friends and visitors as proof of a superior commitment to children.

But statistics don’t lie. In studying the data and the correlation between voter behavioral anomalies and the actual conduct of the school elections, an honest observer would be forced to conclude that historical support of bond issues in Lakeland School District has been less a reflection of voter attitude and more a reflection of the conduct of the elections.

Personally, it has not been a welcome revelation. It means we have a bit of Cook County, Ill., here in Kootenai County.

Idahoans have always supported wise and necessary levies to provide for their children’s education. I believe they always will. It is an understatement to say that the undemocratic approach is both unwise and unnecessary.

The Idaho Legislature should redouble its effort to devise a more equitable strategy for school construction funding, and, in the meantime, model the laws respecting school bond elections on those governing all other elections for the sake of both long-term voter trust and the integrity of the process.

At an absolute minimum the Legislature must immediately correct some of the more egregious abuses of local districts under the current law by banning separate bond elections within 60 days of scheduled general elections, requiring the use of established polling places (except in emergencies) and resolving confusion in certain wording in Title 33, Chapter 4 of the Idaho Statutes, which can be used to justify the exclusion of voters from viewing vote-counting.

In Idaho civics classes, we teach our children that maximizing voter participation legitimizes political decisions; limiting voter involvement provokes conflict. It’s time we acted as if we believed it.