Legislation aims to consolidate elections

BOISE – Idaho voters are no strangers to the polls. Last year, there were more than 400 elections scheduled across the state.

There are elections for city, county and state offices, and for school, highway, fire and library districts. Then there are mosquito abatement, cemetery, hospital and sewer districts. Not all occur on the four established election dates, and many districts have their own polling places and election systems.

Now Idaho’s looking at a proposal to roll all those elections together under the purview of the state’s 44 county clerks, which would make the state’s system more like Washington’s. Each county clerk would run all the elections for voters in their county and hand out the various districts’ ballots at a single, standard polling place for each precinct.

“I certainly support the general concept,” said Kootenai County Clerk Dan English. “For the benefit of the voters and the taxpayer, we definitely should make it as easy as we can.”

But, he said, “it’ll be a massive, massive change, and it’ll take a lot of thought to really do it right.”

Legislation to make the change, introduced Wednesday, runs 93 pages long, with 159 sections and a title that by itself runs six pages. The bill draws all the districts together to hold their elections on the fall general election or spring primary election date, with just two more dates, in March and September, allowed for school bonds or levies.

House GOP Caucus Chairman Ken Roberts, the bill’s lead sponsor, said statewide computer mapping systems would make sure each voter’s ballot matches the districts in which they can vote. The only exemption would be for water and irrigation districts, which still would run their own elections.

Kootenai County already has been doing this, to some extent, for years. English said he’s run the elections for the county’s major cities, as well as for fire, library, highway and irrigation districts. But, he said, “We certainly don’t do all of ‘em by any means. … In Kootenai County alone, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 or 50 different districts.”

According to the state Tax Commission, Idaho has 1,093 taxing districts, of which 931 levied property taxes in 2007.

Bringing all that together likely will require each of Idaho’s counties to hire a full-time staffer to run elections, said Tony Poinelli, lobbyist for the Idaho Association of Counties.

The new legislation says about $4.5 million in sales tax revenue should be directed to counties so they can do all that. “That should be a priority, as far as our budgets,” Roberts told the House State Affairs Committee. “It’s expensive, but we want to get people involved in their government.”

However, his bill taps sales tax money that is directed to cities and counties for revenue-sharing. English said he’s worried that the diversion could leave counties with big new tasks but short of funding to accomplish them. He noted that he now recoups the county’s costs by charging the districts when he runs their elections.

Secretary of State Ben Ysursa has been looking into election consolidation for 25 years. The state’s made some important moves, he noted, such as setting up a uniform voter registration system in 1990.

“The more people that show up to express their will, the better it is for the system,” Ysursa said.

But, Ysursa said, “The county clerks are split on this.”

Lobbyist John Watts has been working with Roberts and others on the bill for months – as a volunteer. Watts, a former state Fish and Game commissioner, lobbies on behalf of clients from chambers of commerce to library districts. As a fan of politics and elections, Watts said, he got tired of helping kill half-baked election consolidation bills, year after year, because of the burden they would have placed on library districts.

“I was tired of beating off silly bills that didn’t accomplish what they wanted to accomplish,” Watts said. He said good election reform should focus on an informed electorate, predictability for voters and increasing participation.

“It’s got to be way easy,” Watts said. “Then people have zero excuse for not voting.”

Roberts’ bill is so complex that he said it already needs several amendments. It would shift all partisan elections to even-numbered years in November and May and non-partisan elections to odd-numbered years. That requires changing numerous sections of law and adjusting how long terms are for trustees of various types of districts.

English said he’s read the whole bill through once but has just begun to study it, having just received a copy in the mail “within the last day or two.”

“This is a huge bill,” Ysursa said. “It’s a good move to get it out there and start the input.”