Idaho Attorney General Ra ú l Labrador suffered yet another defeat in court, this time in his effort to prevent voters from deciding how they want to elect political leaders.
His loss is a victory for the people of Idaho.
For someone who vowed to be the attorney for “the people,” he sure has been working hard against them.
He’s done just about everything he can think of to keep the open primaries, ranked choice voting initiative off the ballot, after publicly declaring his opposition to it by tweeting, “Let’s defeat these bad ideas coming from liberal outside groups.”
He failed before the Idaho Supreme Court, which told him that his petition to the court “fundamentally misapprehends” its role. His claim that the initiative contains two subjects, a violation of the constitutional requirement of a single subject on all legislation, was premature because the initiative hasn’t even passed yet.
His office was told that his accusation of fraud must first be addressed in district court, so he did that, arguing that signature gatherers duped voters into signing the petition to get it on the ballot by misleading them about the nature of the initiative.
Labrador asked the court to throw out all of the signatures and nullify the initiative. The petition was signed by nearly 75,000 people.
But 4th District Judge Patrick Miller wasn’t having it.
“The court finds the attorney general has not met his burden on summary judgment to establish a violation to the extent this court has the authority to declare all signatures invalid,” Miller wrote in his decision released Thursday, adding that “there is very little evidence, even interpreted most favorably to the attorney general,” that the defendants were misleading.
Labrador lost immediately on summary judgment, where the judge is asking: “If I construe all the evidence in the best possible light for Labrador, could he have a case?”
The answer was no.
Even worse, the judge pointed out that Labrador hurt his own case, noting that while the Idaho Attorney General’s Office tried to argue that the initiative’s website and petition were misleading, they contained accurate descriptions and language approved by the Idaho Supreme Court.
“The evidence the attorney general submits actually negates the idea that the defendants perpetrated false statements to thousands of persons who actually signed a petition,” Miller wrote.
At this point, can we just move on?
Can we start debating the actual merits of the initiative, its impacts, its benefits and its drawbacks?
Again, this editorial board is not yet prepared to weigh in on the initiative itself, with a recommendation one way or the other.
However, we do believe that Idaho voters — not the attorney general, who once again was serving himself and not the “people” — should decide the matter.
Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members Greg Lanting, Terri Schorzman and Garry Wenske.
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