A former congressional staffer for Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador has founded a political action committee to fight a ballot initiative seeking to remake the state’s election system.
Jake Ball, a 48-year-old Meridian man, is the public face of Idaho Fair Elections, which incorporated on July 12 according to campaign finance records.
Ball said campaigners with Idahoans for Open Primaries “misled” him into signing the petition, assuring him it would return the state’s primary election to its former system.
He said he didn’t realize the initiative, if implemented, would largely eliminate partisan primary elections.
“I think a lot of people signed that petition under the same guise that I did,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday.
GOP officials closed their party’s primary more than a decade ago to everyone except registered Republicans. Prior to that, registered voters of any party could request a GOP ballot during the primary election.
The initiative would instead advance the four candidates receiving the most votes to the general election.
November contests would then use a ranked choice system where voters order their preferred candidates. If no one earns a simple majority in the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their support is reassigned based on how a voter ranked the candidates.
“It's bad for anybody who wants to have a partisan feel to their elections. It is really easy for operatives to get in there and game the system,” Ball said.
He believes ranked choice voting is too costly, too complicated and would be too hard to properly audit after an election.
Three days after incorporating his new PAC, Ball signed an affidavit on July 15 accusing Idahoans for Open Primaries of using deceptive tactics to gather signatures for the initiative.
His sworn testimony is one of several included in his former boss’s lawsuit against the campaign that’s currently under review by the Idaho Supreme Court. Labrador is asking justices to prevent the initiative from appearing on the November ballot.
Two of the others who submitted affidavits are currently running for state legislative seats as Republicans: Benjamin Chafetz and Steve Tanner.
Another, Ryan Spoon, unsuccessfully ran for a trustee position for the College of Western Idaho in 2022 and served on former Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin’s education task force.
Idahoans for Open Primaries has called Labrador’s lawsuit a “political stunt” that “won’t be taken seriously by the court.”
Ball disputes that.
Despite his connections to Labrador and the Idaho Republican Party, which has formally opposed the initiative, he said that he was genuinely unaware of what the proposal would accomplish if implemented.
“I'm not going to take the time on a Saturday afternoon when I'm mowing my lawn to read the entire thing,” Ball said. “Maybe I should have.”
That experience, he said, has galvanized him into taking action against the initiative campaign.
“I'm not the kind that sits on the sidelines and waits for things to happen. I feel like I was deceived, and I am more than willing to do what I need to do, what I can do, rather, to secure the defeat of this effort.”
Since Idaho Fair Elections formed earlier this month, it has yet to file financial reports outlining its donations and expenditures.
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