Turnout was low as Idaho voters cast their ballots in the state’s first-ever closed primary. Many who did go to the polls said they were frustrated by the new process. One of them was Kelvin Taysom. He turned out early in the southeast Idaho town of Rockland, population 318. He was the fourth person to vote at Rockland City Hall, but his was a vote of protest.
"I feel like we need to participate in the process," he said. "But, I still didn’t want to be affiliated with any of them, so I took the nonpartisan ballot. That’s just a statement because there’s nothing going on on the nonpartisan ballot."
Taysom calls himself conservative. He usually votes Republican, but not this time. In Twin Falls, retired paralegal Lauren Blass also left the voting booth feeling, as she put it, “ticked off.”
"I’m proud to be a Republican, but I’m not proud that Idaho closed its primary," she said. Blass said she was angry that she now has to vote by party, instead of by candidate.
Fellow voter Penny Dockstader agreed. "I’m a registered Democrat," she said. However I didn’t want to go straight Democrat because there was one Republican that I really wanted to vote for, but I couldn’t!"
One person, at least, did say exactly what the Republican Party presumably wants to hear about the new system. That was Clora Conn, a retiree from Twin Falls. "I felt good about it," she said, "because I’m a Republican."
This is a critical election year, Conn said. No Republican should be voting anything but Republican, and she thinks the closed primary will make more people toe the line.
