After almost every election, some disappointed citizens come away shaking their heads and questioning their fellow voters’ intelligence. Usually, it’s just political banter.

In Idaho this week, Secretary of State Ben Ysursa, the state’s top elections official, questioned voters’ intelligence in a wholesale way, and the state Senate went along with him.

With a crowded field of candidates lining up to compete for U.S. Sen. Larry Craig’s job, one name caught Ysursa’s eye: Pro-Life.

That’s it, just Pro-Life, the full legal name of a candidate who used to go by Marvin Richardson. The secretary of state fears that a person whose eye comes across “Pro-Life” while scrolling over a list of candidates will see it as some kind of ballot timeout, inserted there among the candidates’ names to let the voter declare a personal philosophical leaning. Then, too dumb to realize he’d just voted for one candidate, the voter would also vote for another. That would invalidate the ballot.

Therefore, to protect election integrity, Ysursa has suggested legislation “clarifying on the ballot that voters are casting a vote for a person and not a political proposition.”

So, if a candidate has changed his or her name to a political proposition, as Pro-Life seems to have done, Ysursa wants the ballot to explain that by adding a parenthetical note reading, “(a person, formerly known as …)”

In less time than it takes to say “Famous Potatoes,” the Idaho Senate obediently passed Ysursa’s bill 33-0 and sent it to the House, where it’s now in the hands of the State Affairs Committee.

Under this measure, it would be elections officials’ job to flag suspicious names and decide when to bring out the parentheses. With Pro-Life, it’s not a tough call, but sooner or later determined mischief-makers will use subtlety and ambiguity to put bureaucratic discernment to a sterner test. Translation: There will be challenges – and lawsuits.

Oddball names are, well, odd, but they aren’t unheard of. Most people are at least aware of someone who goes by one. Heck, since the ‘60s at least, some creative parents have assigned them at birth (although only changed names would be covered by the proposed law). Rare is the voter who isn’t savvy enough to grasp the situation if it intrudes on the ballot.

Maybe an unorthodox name on the ballot will fluster an occasional voter into a careless decision, but it’s not likely that Idahoans at large would be uninformed and unsophisticated enough to justify this hasty reaction.

Even if that’s plausible, the Legislature should at least take time to consider whether hanging a judgmental footnote on selected candidates’ names doesn’t pose problems with impartiality. There’s more than one way to undermine ballot integrity.