Reprint or Sharpie? Counties to decide

BOISE – When Democrat Larry Grant dropped out of the 1st District congressional race, one thing few knew was that many counties already had printed their ballots for the May primary election – with Grant’s name on them.

“It’s more than a few,” said Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa.

As a result, counties in the 1st District, which stretches from Boise to the Canadian border, have to decide whether to reprint ballots or just black out Grant’s name with a Sharpie or other suitable implement.

Ada County has hired 60 temporary workers to wield the marking pens this weekend and make the necessary crossouts on that county’s 1st District Democratic primary election ballots. Kootenai County is reprinting ballots.

Grant had been in a head-to-head matchup with Walt Minnick for the Democratic nomination to challenge freshman GOP Rep. Bill Sali. But last week, he withdrew from the race and endorsed Minnick.

Ysursa said the candidate thought he was withdrawing in plenty of time. “He didn’t realize they were printed … but the clerks did,” Ysursa said. “So some of the ballots may not look at as nice as they normally would have.”

A little news goes a long way

The news that Coeur d’Alene Sen. John Goedde got a school-zone speeding ticket in February in Boise just as he was sponsoring legislation to increase school-zone speeding tickets statewide didn’t just spread across Idaho.

After this newspaper published a story about the ticket a week ago, Goedde was stunned by the attention it got. “Your revelation has gotten as far as ABC News, USA Today, Fox News and Paul Harvey,” he e-mailed. “Absolutely amazing.”

‘That’s why we have different branches’

House Tax Chairman Dennis Lake, R-Blackfoot, was a bit philosophical after Gov. Butch Otter vetoed his bill to repeal the tax credit for business research activities. “We felt like maybe that was a credit that we didn’t need to have on the books,” Lake said. Businesses generally do research for business reasons, he said, not to get a tax credit. “Do they need the 5 percent credit to justify doing the research? Probably not, from my perspective. But do they take it? Yeah, probably so.”

Lake said though he sponsored the bill, he didn’t feel it was his own creation – he was just trying to do the work recommended by an interim legislative committee that he co-chaired. That joint committee called for a sweeping review of existing tax breaks, but Lake’s House committee refused to consider reviewing most of them.

Lake said Otter called him and “wanted to know how I’d feel if he did veto it.” He said, “That’s fine, that’s what it’s all about, that’s why we have different branches of government. And we’ll look at it again sometime down the road.”

More Idaho inmates shipped out of state

Idaho’s state prisons have shipped another 120 inmates off to an out-of-state private prison, in this case the North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayre, Okla. They join another 120 Idaho prisoners who were sent to the Oklahoma lockup in September. It’s owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the same firm that operates the Idaho Correctional Center south of Boise. Brent Reinke, state prisons chief, said, “We firmly believe Idaho inmates are best managed at home in Idaho. But the fact is there is simply no room for them.”

Idaho currently has 7,400 criminals incarcerated. Not all of them fit in the state’s prisons – the figure includes the 240 in Oklahoma, 373 at the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littlefield, Texas, and about 600 in county jails across Idaho. Reinke expects to send another 120 inmates to Oklahoma this summer. Though Gov. Butch Otter has been talking about a big new prison in Idaho, lawmakers took no action on that in their just-concluded legislative session.

Republicans vs. Republicans

The Idaho Republican Party’s federal lawsuit against GOP Secretary of State Ben Ysursa challenging Idaho’s open primary election system includes some strong words about the “infiltration” the current system allows.

“The (party’s) closed Republican Party primary rule was adopted as a direct response to the infiltration of non-Republicans into the selection process for Idaho Republican Party candidates,” the lawsuit states. “Proponents of the rule perceived that the cross-over of non-Republicans voting for persons who would represent the Idaho Republican Party in a general election posed a direct and immediate threat to the integrity of the Party. … Permitting non-Republicans to select the Republican candidate weakens, dilutes and obstructs that process by forcing the Idaho Republican Party to associate with nonparty members, and forcing its candidates to modify their political message, ideology and positions on public policy issues in order to persuade non-Party members to vote for them in the primary election.”

Party Executive Director Sid Smith said in a news release, “According to the resolution approved by the party Central Committee in January, the party was required to file suit within 10 days of adjournment of the legislature, thereby making this suit unavoidable.”