Idaho’s Open Primaries & Final Four Voting Initiative: Sometimes it Takes a Coalition!

Opening

Luke Mayville (Guest): We are here today because we are tired of playing the same old game under a broken set of rules. 

Robert Pease (Host): Luke Mayville is co-founder of the grassroots group, Reclaim Idaho. He’s addressing volunteers on the final day of signature collection for Idaho’s Open Primaries or Final Four Voting Ballot initiative. 

Luke Mayville: So by putting this Open Primaries initiative on the ballot, we are trying something different this year. We’re going at the root of the problem. We are giving the voters of Idaho a chance to take back their power. 

Robert Pease: As proposed, Idaho’s Open Primaries ballot measure is very much on the Alaska Final Four voting model as first blueprinted by our recent guest Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry.

Luke Mayville: The root of the problem is the fact that there are 270,000 independent voters who are blocked from voting in the most important primary elections. And the root of the problem is that we don’t even have competitive general elections. And that means that when you show up to vote in November, your vote has no real power.

Robert Pease: If validated and passed this Idaho ballot measure would create an open, unified primary election followed by a ranked choice or instant runoff general election. And that’s a system that has energized non partisan reform movements in numerous states throughout the country. 

Luke Mayville: Now I just want to give a heartfelt thank you to every single volunteer who collected any signatures for this initiative. You all did such an incredible amount over this past year. Please give yourself a huge round of applause because this victory, this victory is yours.

Robert Pease: Luke Mayville and Reclaim Idaho have led the charge in collecting over 90 thousand signatures in favor of this reform from a majority of districts in this deeply conservative state, but with some important help from the group Mormon Women for Ethical Government, commonly called M-WEG, and represented by Margart Kinzel. 

Margaret Kinzel (Guest): And so when Luke announced the Open Primaries initiative in, gosh, was that just this past year in MWeg National was looking at it at the same time and we were starting to look about how do we do the 2024 session differently? And so it all ju st sort of came together. 

Robert Pease: Another important member of this coalition is former Idaho Attorney General and Chief Justice, Jim Jones, who has gathered endorsement of over 100 former GOP officials in Idaho for the Open Primaries or Final Four initiative. 

Jim Jones(guest): After the 2022 Alaska election, it appeared to me that this was the answer to Idaho’s problem because we had gotten so involved in culture wars :and the culture warriors were essentially picked by the Republican Party, which had been taken over by extremists. 

Robert Pease: Sometimes a village is not enough and it takes a broad coalition to effect real change. I’m Robert Pease and this is the Purple Principle, a podcast on the perils of polarization but focusing this season on some very substantial efforts to depolarize our politics through state level election reforms. 

Idaho long had semi-open primaries where independent voters could select which primary to vote in. But that option was taken away by the legislature in 2011, which also attempted to weaken citizen ballot initiatives. So let’s learn how this coalition came together around these issues and may be poised to pass a major election reform this year in Idaho despite significant pushback from the GOP powers that be.

Luke Mayville Interview

Luke Mayville: When we first decided to take on this issue of election reform, we thought that we had a real path to victory. For years now, as we’ve talked to people about different issues, whether it was healthcare or funding for public education, there was a recurring theme where people would mention that this ballot issue process is really the only way that they feel they have a voice in the political process. And that always left us with a thought of, well, isn’t that itself a serious problem? Because as a voter, shouldn’t you have a voice in your ordinary election process? It shouldn’t take an initiative to address every issue. So for years now, we felt that election reform would be a powerful idea if we could find a way to make it work. That said, it is challenging in that it is a little more difficult to go to the average voter and talk about reforming the election system than, for example, for simply expanding healthcare coverage or getting more money for public schools. It takes a little bit more of an explanation, takes a little bit more of a conversation. 

Robert Pease: Well, let’s talk a little bit about that added layer of difficulty with election reform. Are some of the same volunteers now working on election reform as worked on Medicaid expansion?

Luke Mayville: We have currently about 2000 volunteers all across the state working to get this initiative on the ballot. So many of those volunteers were actually with us from the very beginning back in 2017 when we launched Medicaid expansion, but not all of them. 

Luke Mayville: We ask people to do things that are challenging, maybe sometimes inconvenient, importantly, oftentimes things that take a little bit of courage even, like going out and knocking on a stranger’s door and talking about something related to politics. Most people don’t want to do that.

Luke Mayville: And then the last part, which we think is also a big advance, is that once you’re voting in that top four general election, you can choose your favorite candidate. And if you want to, you can also rank them one through four. Second choice, third choice, fourth choice.

Speaker 2: I mean, that mess last time was just a mess. Whether it was true, whether that really happened or not, I think we need to renovate that and to guarantee honesty and stuff with that. And to eliminate people being able to cheat basically.

Luke Mayville: Well, it’s definitely not good if there’s not confidence in the system. And part of what we’re trying to do with this initiative is make people really believe that their vote matters. And to do that, I think you really need to have competitive elections. 

Luke Mayville: Something I’ve believed for a long time now is that a real problem with our politics is that there’s too many activists and organizations and political leaders that just try to ask the ordinary citizen only to do really easy things. One click of an email, one quick phone call. That’s all we’re going to ask you to do. We’ve found that there are people all across our state, certainly, and we think probably all across the country, who are really yearning to do something bigger, who actually want to be a part of something, in many cases, something monumental that will actually change things for the better. 

Robert Pease: Well, it is a remarkable bit of mobilization. We want to understand a bit more about you and how you got to this point.

Luke Mayville: Well, I grew up in North Idaho and I grew up quite conservative in many ways. I grew up in a church environment and a political environment that tended to be pretty right-leaning. A really important moment for me that really led me towards a path of very much independent mindedness in challenging the status quo was the Iraq War. It happened when I was in high school and even at a very young age, as I was only just learning about public affairs, it seemed completely unjustified, and that led me down a path of just really challenging the way things are and trying to think about how things could be different. I then took that down a long winding path of political philosophy, but eventually turned towards organizing and, through a number of different steps, ended up moving back and joining with some old friends and starting this organization, Reclaim Idaho. 

Robert Pease: It seems like perhaps there was a decision made to emphasize Open Primaries, it’s called the Open Primaries Initiative. Was that a conscious decision that it’s easier to sort of lead with that?

Luke Mayville: Well, we have found that it’s easier to start a conversation on the Open Primaries issue and then build on top of that to introduce the idea of an instant runoff and rank choice voting. So open primaries is the easier issue to lead with, but importantly, open primaries is in our view, the central reform because the core grievance that’s out there in the public already, we don’t need to convince anyone about it, it’s already out there is the problem of the closed primary, the problem of the closed partisan primary that basically limits political participation, meaningful political participation to a tiny part of the population. 

Luke Mayville: We’re blasting open the closed primary system, but then it’s critically important to understand that rank choice voting goes hand in glove with that, because we’re not, we very much prefer not to only open up the system to two choices because we generally found that that’s very limiting. We want there to be more meaningful choices on the general election ballot, and that’s why we’ve chosen top four. But then once you have top four at the most basic level, you’ve got to have a way to not split the vote, and that’s where the instant runoff comes in. So instant runoff with Rank Choice voting just flows seamlessly out of the nonpartisan open primary.

Robert Pease: Well, we spoke to Catherine Gehl recently, author of the Politics Industry, very instrumental in creating a blueprint for Final Four, final five voting, as was passed in Alaska. And she very candidly says, this is difficult, but people fought a revolution for these rights. You’ve studied that revolution and some of the seminal figures there. Does it ever cross your mind that this is a little bit like answering the concerns that they had from the very beginning, the Washington warning about parties? John Adams warning about oligarchy? 

Luke Mayville: I do believe that these reforms are about fundamental principles that do go all the way back to our founding as a country. And maybe the simplest connection is to just go straight to the Declaration of Independence, which says very clearly that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. That idea is also in state constitutions all across the country in Idaho, right at the top of the Constitution, one of the very first lines in the document says, all political power is inherent in the people. And that’s that basic idea of consent, consent of the governed. And that’s a very different system than what we have right now because the system we have right now is not all power is inherent in the people. It really is something more like all power is inherent in special interest groups. All power is inherent in a tiny number of voters who participate in primary elections. 

Robert Pease: How does it feel to be on the cusp of having many more signatures than you need, and does the fact that you will have many more signatures mean that there’s a clearer path towards passage in November? 

Luke Mayville: Well, we know that when we started this initiative campaign, there was a great deal of doubt out there among people who were following it closely, that we could build a really broad coalition for this effort. And we feel that we’ve resoundingly answered that doubt by going out and getting nearly a hundred thousand people to sign this initiative and not just people of one political party or political leaning. In fact, the people who’ve signed this initiative are very much a reflection of the people of Idaho. When all is said and done, the majority of those signatures are going to be Republican. Then there’s going to be a big block of independent voters and also a slice of Democratic voters just like Idaho. And it’s that same coalition that signed the initiative that’s going to need to come out in full force in November. It’s going to have to be bigger. It’s a larger number of people. But we’ve got a number of months to put all that together. 

Robert Pease: Well, tell us about your first meeting with Jim Jones. You must have known him by reputation, by his resume, and what were your first impressions when you met him and did you immediately feel like you could work together?

Luke Mayville: My very first impression of Jim Jones was just that we were incredibly fortunate that he came out of nowhere and was all of a sudden on our side. We had just come out of winning the Medicaid expansion campaign and we were dealing with a bitter legislature that was not only trying to repeal Medicaid expansion, but that was actually trying to dismantle the ballot initiative process. And all of a sudden this former Chief justice starts writing these op-ed columns defending all the work that we were doing and defending the ballot initiative process. So I tracked down his phone number, called him up, and we immediately started planning a statewide tour of events where we just held public forums where we discussed the value of the ballot initiative process. And we’ve managed to defend the initiative in court now several times and we’ve just done great work together ever since. And it’s been a privilege to work with him. 

Robert Pease: So coalition building, it seems that there’s another group, the Mormon Women for Ethical Government who are involved. Tell us about how you formed an alliance with that group…

Luke Mayville: Our relationship with Mormon Women for Ethical Government goes back before this election reform campaign because we were very fortunate to work with them probably about two years ago now, defending the initiative process. And that’s a major theme of this campaign and the coalition we’ve built is that a lot of us have already worked together in the past on a different election issue, which is the defense of the initiative process in Idaho. So members of the Idaho Mormon Women for Ethical Government were showing up in the legislature testifying in defense of the initiative process when there were these bills coming from the legislature trying to dismantle initiative rights. So that’s where we first came into contact with some of the key leaders with Mormon Women for Ethical Government. And then as soon as we started thinking about this new election reform initiative, we immediately reached out to them and started the conversation, is this something you’re interested in? Is this something you might be willing to support? 

Margaret Kinzel Interview

Robert Pease: We’ve been learning about grassroots mobilization with Luke Mayville, co-founder of Reclaim Idaho, the group that has spent the better part of a year collecting signatures for Idaho’s Open Primaries or Final Four Voting initiative. They now await signature validation before mobilizing for passage of the ballot in November.. And they have some important partners in that effort. Again, a village is not always enough. For state level reform it takes a coalition. And in Idaho this coalition includes Mormon Women for Ethical Government represented by Margaret Kinzel .She’s Head of the Math Dept at Boise State. And she was interviewed in that beautiful mountain-ringed city by Associate Producer, Alex Couraud. 

Margaret Kinzel: If you don’t know much about Boise? First of all,we’re not Iowa, everybody always gets Idaho and Iowa confused. We’re out here in Idaho, it’s not all about potatoes. Boise is really a very cosmopolitan city. It’s very outdoor friendly. Most of the restaurants have outdoor patio seating that you can use most of the year. And so the weather, you think about Idaho as snow and ice and Boise itself doesn’t get a lot of that. 

Alex Couraud (co-host): So why do you think you are working on a movement here in this state? 

Margaret Kinzel: I work at the university and we live in Boise, and so you have a lot more diverse perspectives and personalities interacting with that and then seeing the government not necessarily reflecting all of those opinions has been important to me. I am very committed to Boise. This is our home. This is where we work. My husband also works in the Math Department, and so we are very committed to this right now. And I really wanted to know that the government is listening to the people and it doesn’t feel like that at the moment.

Alex Couraud: How do you see the political climate here in Idaho?

Margaret Kinzel: It is very conservative. There’s strong traditions here. A lot of families can trace their ancestry back to the people who settled this area. And so there’s a lot of love of the land and a fierce individualism and somewhat of a mistrust of government for a number of reasons.

But I think the conservative nature of Idaho really plays out in a couple of ways. There are some people who say, I’m a Republican, I’m going to do what the Republican party says. I’m fine with that, that’s fine. But we’ve also come across a lot of people who really favor that individualism side of things, and they want the ability to be able to express their voice and they want their voice to be heard. So I think that tradition of Idaho, of being independent but also being conservative really sort of comes together in, yeah, I want the government to stay out of my business, but I want them to listen to me too, if that makes sense.

Alex Couraud: Can you explain your faith a little bit to me and what that means to you?

Margaret Kinzel: A core aspect of my faith is that and of my identity is that I am a daughter of a loving God who wants us all to be the best versions of ourselves. And that really comes back to everything I do that encourages me to see others also as children of a loving father that wants us to be our best selves. 

And so that really drives a lot of what I do in my classroom at work. I respect each student in there, and we’re all there together to try to have this mathematical experience and to transform in some small way and be different people and be better people. And my faith is right along with those lines. We come together and we have conversations and we try to come out a little bit better than we went in.

Alex Couraud: And has there ever been a time that maybe you’ve questioned that faith?

Margaret Kinzel: All the time. Anytime you’re involved in an organization, there’s the principles that guide the organization, but then there’s the organization itself. My faith as my identity as I was just speaking about as a child of a God that is very central to who I am and how I interact with things. The church, the LDS Church is now a worldwide organization. And so meeting the needs of that diverse population is a big challenge. And if I were in charge, there may be some things I would do differently, but I’m not in charge and I’m not looking to be in charge. But yeah, so there are times where I think there are places where any organization can grow.

Alex Couraud: So what do you think in particular is important or impactful about Mormon women doing this sort of advocacy work?

Margaret Kinzel: Mormon women are amazing. Throughout our history. They have shown tenacity and independence and just a fierce determination to get things done. There’s a joke within the church that if you want something, if you want to talk about something, call the men. If you want to get something done, call the women. And that’s just part of who we are. And I think what makes us powerful as an advocacy group is that we do take the time to stop and think about it, reconnect with our principles, and make sure that we are acting in a manner that we can really live up to.

Margaret Kinzel: So MWEG is a national organization and the slogan is that they are peaceful, proactive, nonpartisan, and faithful. And holding all of those four aspects at the same time can be challenging. But one way that they accomplish that is by choosing their advocacies carefully. They’re not going to choose advocacies that are really politically divisive. For instance, for a couple of reasons. We’re not taking on a stand on abortion and we’re not officially advocating for abortion one way or the other. There’s mixed feelings within the church about abortion and there’s mixed feelings across the women that identify with mwe about that. And that would be a very divisive thing. And that’s very much a one side or the other political. And so some of it is just not taking on some of those issues that are going to divide our membership. But the more proactive and purposeful part of mweg is this, again, coming back to this idea of listening and being heard.

Alex Couraud: Can you explain a little bit more about what you do within the effort? 

Margaret Kinzel: We had a meeting early on with Luke and reclaim Idaho and just saying that what they had in mind for that they were looking for partners, reclaim Idaho has done several efforts in the state and they wanted this to be a wider issue that is not just a reclaim Idaho issue. This was an Idaho issue. And so they were looking for partners. And so we met several times with that. We checked in with national and back and forth to make sure that this is what we really wanted to take on as terms of the Idaho chapter. It was important for us to know that our members, we have about 200 members across the state, and we wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just the handful of us here in Boise that were passionate about this, that was taking this on. And so we actually did just a small poll just to check in, what do you know about open primaries? How do you feel about this? How do you feel about us getting involved in it? And it really came back that everybody in different ways didn’t feel like their voices were being heard with their local government and with the state government. 

One of the things that really here in Idaho helped me sign on to being active in this effort was hearing how many of our races are uncontested in the 2022 election, nine of the 38 districts, the race for state senator and the two state representatives were uncontested. So you had no choice to vote for, you either voted for the candidate or you didn’t. And that’s just unheard of to me. The primary elections are won by an average of 16% of registered voters in the primary elections. And so that’s when the decisions are being made and if whoever wins that primary election is the candidate in the general election. And so there’s a very small percentage that are actually able to have their voices heard in our elections.

Alex Couraud: I’m just wondering what has your work been like with Jim Jones in particular? Have you done a lot of work with him?

Margaret Kinzel: He spoke at one of our signature gathering rallies maybe a month or so ago, and just sort of firing everybody up for these last few weeks of trying to get all the signatures in there. He’s funny, he’s enthusiastic, and he really boils it down to what matters. What matters is the voters need to be heard, and that’s the aspect that’s resonating with me. I understand that if you’re my elected official, you’re not necessarily going to decide and do what I want you to do, but I want to know that my voice has been heard and he’s very passionate about that.

Robert Pease: We’ve been speaking with Margaret Kinzel of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, partners along with Luke Mayville and Reclaim Idaho and the former State Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Jones. They’re working to advance non-partisan election reform for the state of Idaho. 

Luke Mayville: And I’m going to pass the microphone off to someone who was recently, very much rightfully called the moral compass of our state, 

Robert Pease: That’s Luke Mayville introducing Jim Jones to Reclaim Idaho volunteers on that final day of signature gathering for the Open Primaries initiative. 

 Luke Mayville: someone who’s been a true champion of our cause since the very beginning. Our former Attorney General and Chief Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, Jim Jones,

Jim Jones: James Luke. I never thought of myself as a moral compass. I have been called a communist…But I come at this from a bit of a different perspective than some of you. I got so distressed with my party. I recruited a group called Republicans for Open Primaries. A lot of people who are long time Republicans, they see life a little differently than I do on so many issues. But the issue that they agree upon is that everybody, regardless of their political persuasion, should have the right to select their public officials who represent them in the legislature.

Jim Jones Interview

Robert Pease: The Idaho Open Primaries effort was energized in part by the passage of Final Four Voting in Alaska. But a deep feeling of dissatisfaction with the direction of Idaho politics has been brewing for over a decade, since at least the closing of the GOP primary in 2011 and a legislative attempt to make ballot reform more difficult. As a former candidate for the US House and Senate, as well as a former Attorney General and State Supreme Court Chief Justice, Jim Jones has long observed the decline of civility and pragmatism in Idaho politics. So we asked him what effect he’s hoping for should Final Four Voting make it onto the ballot and pass in November of 2024. 

 Jim Jones: Well, the thing that we’re looking at is a system that sort of is designed for the extremists, the party bosses, and the Republican party because you can win a primary with only 8.8% of the registered voters in your legislative district. The party machinery helps that happen. And when you’re the winner in the primary in Idaho, almost everybody except in a few areas like Boise, is the eventual winner in the general election. The more extreme you are, the better chances you have of succeeding in winning the primary that gives the party bosses so much control over who gets elected in the general election. 

Robert Pease: So you had for a time what we might call semi semi-open primaries. And was it around 2011 the legislature passed a law creating a more closed primary system? 

Jim Jones: Yeah, the legislature approved a law that was not really popular with the entire Republican Party. Our former governor, Butch Otter was strongly opposed to it at the time, but they passed the law allowing the Republicans to close their primary to only registered Republicans. And the 2012 election was held with that closed primary. And it’s been that way ever since. And each year our legislature has got more extreme. 

Robert Pease: I think it’s so interesting that you are a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court going back to that body as a citizen with a grievance. So what was tha,t like to go back to the place where you had led the court for several years, been on the court for many years, what was that like? 

Jim Jones: I tried to keep a very low profile in the lawsuit against the Attorney General, but I knew that we had a good balanced Supreme Court. It’s not one of those courts that is inhabited by politicians, it’s a very balanced court. I thought we would win our case. My organization along with Reclaim Idaho, which is doing the signature gatherings, filed a lawsuit. I thought we would prevail and we did. We got a much better ballot title to use during the petition drive. 

Robert Pease: Well, tell us a little bit about the opponents of the ballot Initiative and what kind of messaging they’re putting out around it, and are there any messages that you feel, uh oh, this one might be effective? 

Jim Jones: I think what they’re trying to do mainly is to create confusion as to what rank choice voting entails. They’re talking about your vote won’t count or that some people are going to get two votes I mean, a lot of their stuff just doesn’t make sense. And it’s kind of like my initial feeling. I don’t know what this thing is rank choice and it takes a little time to figure it out. And I think they are preying on the reluctance of voters to get into something that looks new to them.

Robert Pease: And you’ve formed an alliance or a coalition or a partnership with a group reclaim Idaho that has a track record of getting Medicaid expansion for Idaho. Tell us about your initial experience with Reclaim Idaho with Luke Mayville. ]..

Jim Jones: Well, when Reclaim Idaho started its initiative drive to expand Medicaid in Idaho, I thought that’s kind of an uphill climb and these people are going to have a hard time doing it. But he recruited an all volunteer force. They don’t have paid signature gatherers, and they were everywhere. They got a tremendous vote in favor of it in the general election, 60%. The legislature was frightened to try to undo it. They wanted to do it, they wanted to do away with it. But with that kind of vote, they were reluctant to get involved in it. They’ve tried to pick away at it ever since, but haven’t had much success. 

Jim Jones: And again, all by voluntary effort and in this current Open Primaries initiative effort, all volunteer again. And there’s just been so much widespread support for it, even in areas like the far north where the Republicans, the extremist branch holds sway. 

Robert Pease: Well, we’ve been doing interviews around the country with organizers of these various ballot initiatives, and there are plenty of cases where the Democratic Party in its own way pushes back very hard on opening primaries on rank choice voting because they’re in control. So is there a point at which parties have so much control for so long that they behave maybe not in identical ways, but in similar ways that undermine democracy? 

Jim Jones: I think the situation, like for instance in the District of Columbia where the Democrats have full control over who gets on the ticket and who is going to serve on positions representing the party, anytime a party gets full control over the machinery of government and who gets elected, I think they want to keep it that way. And so to those people in heavily Democrat areas, I think they ought to look at this system of voting because it will, I think, cut down on the nastiness in the politics where you have vicious sniping at one another. It really pains me when I hear people talking about either Republicans or Democrats as the enemy, people that have to be put down, people that have to be fought against just because they’re a member of a certain party that’s really destructive to politics in the United States, and it’s a danger to democracy. 

Robert Pease: That’s Former Attorney General and State Chief Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones on the Final Four voting ballot measure there in Idaho which they’ve titled The Open Primaries initiative. At 82 years young the Honorable Jim Jones is part of a broad coalition supporting the reform including Luke Mayville’s grassroots volunteer based group, Reclaim Idaho:

 Luke Mayville: It shouldn’t take an initiative to address every issue. 

Robert Pease: And also Mormon Woman for Ethical Government, whose co-liason for the ballot measure is Margaret Kinzel.

Margaret Kinzel: So I think that tradition of Idaho, of being independent, but also being conservative really sort of comes together in, yeah, I want the government to stay out of my business, but I want them to listen to me too

Closing

Robert Pease: Thanks to Jim, Luke, Margaret and other coalition members for interviewing with us on our April trip to Boise. We’re looking forward to heading back there in July for an update on the initiative and to visiting several other states engaged in similar efforts, including the not quite a state district of columbia. A reform effort there to open each party’s primaries and create a ranked choice general election is led by Lisa Rice of Make All Votes Count DC.

Lisa Rice: You know, when you get down to what we are trying to accomplish: access and accountability…

Robert Pease: That’s next up on the Purple Principle, we move from red to blue and a visit to the nation’s capital district which has long lacked representation in US Congress and also long elected city council members and other important officials with a tiny percentage of registered voters in the all important democratic primaries. 

Lisa Rice: In our ward, we were going to send, again, because the primary decides, that we’re gonna send someone who wasn’t even supported by maybe 30%, 31, 32 something, something that’s really so far from 50% it’s laughable.

Robert Pease: We hope you’ll join us for that episode – it’s part of our non-partisan election reform series running through November of this year. We also hope you’ll share us on social media and check out our YouTube page for video highlights of all our season four guests and episodes. 

Robert Pease: The Purple Principle is created by a talented team of audio reformers. Kevin A Kiline – Senior Audio Engineer, Vienna Maglio – Bookings & Field Producer, Alex Couraud – Associate Producer for Audio, Trevor Prophet – Digital Ops & Strategy, Mary Claire Kogler – Video Production, and Sarah Kim – Fact Checking & Research. 

Robert Pease: The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge production. Original music by Ryan Adair Rooney.