OPINION: The first victims of the new election law: legal voters

“With this strict ID requirement, it feels like I am denying legitimate citizens who can prove their residency the right to vote,” Ada County Clerk Trent Tripple told the Statesman.

One of the bill’s sponsors was Rep. Brandon Mitchell, R-Moscow, who said the same day there was a flaw in the registration that would allow me to vote with a scuba pass and an Amazon box.

Democrats went along with it, ostensibly because it contained the stamp of approval from Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican respected and trusted by both sides of the aisle.

The bill, House Bill 340, passed 59-4 in the House and 23-12 in the Senate with little or no debate in either the chamber or committee.

While the main focus of the bill is to get rid of student IDs as a form of identification, there is no mention of its impact on new residents who still hold out-of-state licenses.

Mitchell stated that in the previous election, only 120 people used their student ID to vote; This was a very small number. But the Republican Party’s obsession with “illegal voting,” based on Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and stolen, has no limits, regardless of how many legitimate voters it disenfranchises along the way.

The bill was passed in 2023 but is likely seeing the light of day now due to heavy participation in the presidential elections.

So where was the educational campaign reminding voters that their out-of-state licenses would no longer be accepted as valid identification?

It’s another stark reminder that lawmakers, and apparently the secretary of state, need to do a better job of anticipating the negative effects of their decisions.

TNS