What Boise City Council recount tells us about elections in Idaho — and in general | Opinion

A recount is a good opportunity to test the integrity of elections.

The race for the Boise City Council seat in District 3 this year provided just such an opportunity. Candidate Josh Johnston was right to request a recount; the results were close enough to warrant one.

After the Nov. 7 count was tallied, Kathy Corless had received 2,566 votes, just 15 more than Johnston’s 2,551. Two other candidates, Theresa Vawter and Chris Blanchard, received 1,630 and 1,059 votes, respectively.

The 0.19% margin between Corless and Johnston, out of the total 7,806 votes cast, was too high for a free recount (state code sets the free recount limit at an incredibly low 0.1%), so Johnston had to pay the $1,600 for the recount in all 16 precincts, as well as absentee and early voting ballots.

Once Johnston requested the recount, officials with the Ada County Elections Office on Thursday hand-counted a sampling of 5% of the ballots in the race. If the hand count had differed from the machine count by less than 1%, or two votes, whichever is greater, then the recount was to be conducted by a machine scan of the ballots.

As it turned out, the hand count of 5% of the ballots matched the machine count from Election Day exactly, so the Elections Office recounted all of the ballots by machine.

After the recount, which was overseen by the Idaho Attorney General’s Office, the results turned out to be the exact same. Every precinct, every ballot, the exact same.

You would think that maybe one or two votes got messed up somewhere along the line, but that wasn’t the case.

As Corless told the Idaho Statesman by text, the unchanged result exhibits “the integrity in our election process.”

Elections in general continue to be under attack in the U.S., stemming primarily from former President Donald Trump’s debunked claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” and “stolen.” To this day, an alarming number of people still believe him and repeat the conspiracy that voting “machines” can rig elections.

People who peddle “The Big Lie” that the election was stolen continue to claim — falsely — that the 2020 presidential election was electronically manipulated even in states that Trump won, like Idaho, with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell leading the charge. He claimed — and continues to claim — electronic tampering in all 44 counties in Idaho, a suspicious accusation, given that seven counties in Idaho don’t even count ballots electronically.

As it is, Trump won Idaho with 64% of the vote, tallying 554,119 votes to President Joe Biden’s 287,021.

Lindell’s baseless accusations prompted the Idaho attorney general in 2021 to conduct an investigation of the results. If anything, votes for Trump were overcounted, as audits of results in two counties showed an overcount of nine votes in Butte County for Trump and an overcount of one vote for Trump in Camas County.

Another recount conducted in Bonner County showed nine ballots in error, with eight attributed to Trump and one to Biden, likely due to extremely light markings that the tabulation machine could not pick up on Election Day, according to the AG’s office. It wasn’t, as Lindell claimed, because of Chinese government hacking into the machines. As Bonner County Clerk Michael Rosedale pointed out, the computer that tabulated the votes wasn’t even connected to the internet.

So why is this important?

Before the 2020 election, Trump said he would accept the election results — only if he won. If he lost, well, as we saw, he didn’t accept the results, leading his supporters to attempt an insurrection on the Capitol on Jan. 6.

As we head into another presidential election next year, it’s vital that Americans have faith that, even if their candidate doesn’t win, the results are fair, true and accurate. As they have been for decades.

The recount results in the Boise City Council District 3 race should bolster that faith.

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 Mary Rohlfing and Patricia Nilsson.