Jerome absentee ballot error hangs over District 26 election
By Eric Valentine
It could be worse, but that thing—a discrepancy between absentee ballots and regular ballots—that no county in America wants on Election Day will be hanging over the head of Jerome County election officials. As votes get tallied Tuesday, Nov. 8, Jerome staffers may be quietly hoping that whoever wins the District 26 Idaho Senate seat will win by a margin greater than all the votes cast for Don Lappin, a man who isn’t even a candidate anymore.
At issue are a batch of 600 Jerome County absentee ballots sent out weeks ago to the voters who requested them. Those ballots erroneously listed Lappin as the Independent candidate challenging Laurie Lickley (Republican Party) and Ron Taylor (Democratic Party) for retiring Sen. Michelle Stennett’s District 26 seat in the Idaho State Legislature. The problem: Lappin withdrew from the race—correctly, before the deadline—but county staff neglected to remove his name.
That means if the winning candidate’s margin of victory is less than the number of votes cast for Lappin, there will need to be a redo, or special election, in December.
“It happened on that first batch of ballots. It was a clerical error and it got missed. I didn’t catch it,” Jerome County Elections Clerk Cy Lootens explained. “It’s the first time an incorrect ballot went out in Jerome County as far as we know.”
Lootens, according to his Linkedin profile, has worked for the county since 2014.
District 26 represents roughly 43,000 residents across three counties—Jerome, Lincoln, and Blaine. Lootens said he and his Jerome County staffers scrambled to correct the error once it was noticed. Letters got sent to absentee voters explaining they would be throwing away their vote if they selected Lappin. About 300 people sent their unmarked ballots back to the county and got issued new ones.
As of Oct. 31, Lootens said roughly 300 absentee ballots were still unaccounted for. That makes 300 the margin of victory that’s needed to avoid a December redo. In the 2018 race, Sen. Stennett defeated her opponent by just over 3,000 votes. In the 2020 race, Stennett defeated her opponent by less than 3,000 votes. Seems cushiony, but Stennett had been a popular incumbent since 2010 and was even her party’s Minority Leader at the Capitol.
It’s important to note how Stennett’s victories came prior to the 2021 redistricting, which turned an historically very blue (Democratic) District 26 slightly more red. In addition, Republican hopeful Lickley has a known track record as a member of Idaho’s House of Representatives. And finally, early voter turnout, the counties have reported, is rather high, indicating the ‘red wave’ expected nationally could cover District 26 to some degree. Put that all together and it spells out: Democratic hopeful and rookie politician Taylor is hardly a shoe-in.
And then there’s the whole ‘opposite day’ war of words supporters for each candidate have found themselves in. Taylor, moderate politically, is a retired firefighter who doesn’t have any track record where opponents could namecall him into the ‘lib-tard’ zone. A group called Republicans for Ron Taylor has emerged as a mouthpiece for him, too. However, in one communication, they suggest that Lickley—due to the Republican hopeful’s support of other renewable energy projects—supports the Lava Ridge wind farm proposed for Minidioka, which is being fought intensely by residents and descendants of Japanese who were interned there during World War II.
But it would be categorically untrue to make that claim. This past summer Lickley wrote a two-page letter clearly opposing the 73,000-acre, 400-unit Bureau of Land Management wind turbine project proposal.
“My rural communities have reasonably spoken. Any benefit from a project this size is lost in its tremendous footprint,” Lickley wrote. “I respectfully request the Department of Interior issue a stay on the Lava Ridge Wind Energy Project.”