A threat to the community is a threat to all
BY Isaiah Frizzell
Seventy-five percent of life is just showing up. Even if you recline toward armchair quarterbacking (pun intended) or watching YouTube instructionals, the people in your life, in your circles—they’re hoping you’ll show up—whether it’s your presence, your voice, a comment on social media or a beautiful photo in your phone. The other 25% is getting along? Let’s do it.
Connection
Deeper and more fundamental than being our ‘greatest’ strength, community simply IS our strength. Getting right down to it, our connections are the actual currency we exchange. Any materials—food, shelter, clothing—are simply riding the wave. How did they get to you? Your connections. Go naked, alone into the forest and survive for a year and you get the point.
On a mellow, autumnal evening in Hailey last Thursday, September 14, a meeting was called to bring together disparate groups in an attempt to foster unity and dispel division. Some groups were niche, some broad, but all share values while, perhaps, differing on a detail or a personality. Ok, such is life. However, the theme running through this and future meetups is that NOW is the time to put aside our differences and connect in understanding to make lasting decisions that affect our quality of life. We’re being called upon to become coherent with each other and deal with a direct attack on the process with which we potentiate our lives.
Enter Jane Dyndiuk.
‘Miss Jane’ (Dyndiuk was in education for 14 years) has been uniting women in Sun Valley for over a decade. Jane is again president of the Blaine County Republican Women’s group, holding meetups in person and online. She is the lighthouse beaming safe harbor in occasionally choppy seas and make no mistake we are currently in those choppy seas.
The premise of her evening event was to educate and bring awareness to a tricky and little known reform of our voting system barreling at us under the name Rank Choice Voting (RCV), also peddled as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There’s plenty of information online about this intentionally confusing and obfuscating scam which deserves its own hazard symbol. This article is to bring awareness, not dive into the minutiae. You can search Rank Choice Voting to figure it out or, if reading online, click here. Simply put, it is an unconstitutional juggling of votes through multiple counts to allow for shifting tallies and candidates behind a black box —ultimately allowing either party to manipulate the outcome of an election for the opposing candidate. Point blank, it is a weaponization of the voting system.
Integral people recognize that ‘One Person, One Vote’ is the simplest, most constitutionally secure way of electing a candidate — in any election, at any level. Meanwhile, it is being brought to a ballot near you through propaganda and think-tank money. Idaho roundly rejected RCV through House Bill 179 on March 21, 2023, and yet it still rears its hydra head through one means or another.
Chairwoman Dorothy Moon of the Idaho Republican Party spoke eloquently on Thursday of the pitfalls of Rank Choice Voting and, while she explained it well, the very design of the system is to mire one in the mental gymnastics of the adjusting and shifting of votes such that said person will generally glaze over, fade away and give up — a tried-and-true tactic to confuse constitutional simplicity with absurd mathematical chicanery. It’s elegant and easy to understand One person, One Vote. The Rank Choice Voting system has proven so devious and foolhardy that in nearly every state where it has been used — California, Maine, Alaska, New York, to name a few — it has resulted in miscounts, wrong winners and truly disingenuous mayhem that was only discovered by external auditors.
Like a shell in a con artist’s game, Rank Choice Voting shifts votes between candidates, up and down multiple tallies — think thick layers of bubbly division. And through this we become mired in that division.
In the words of Eric Parker: “It’s a threat to democracy! We live in a Constitutional Republic with a Democratic election process, and one of the key pillars of that process is the principle of one person, one vote. Rank Choice Voting turns that Democratic principle on its head by awarding some people multiple votes. It should be banned in the State in order to protect the voting rights of the citizens.”
A community does not stand for division and, thus, with RCV exposed, the meeting was a success. Jane secured a large turnout in Hailey with members from as far away as Twin Falls, with many roundtable discussions and very vocal questions and suggestions about the issues facing our constitutional rights. Jane and the Blaine County Republican Women’s group generously catered the large turnout with delicious food from La Cabañita and judiciously shared the microphone with all who were willing to speak. While many feel there’s a missing demographic in this realm, namely younger folk, as much as 50% of the crowd were under 40. Nice!
Whichever end of the political spectrum you line with, Rank Choice Voting is a tool to manipulate outcome. Speculation on which party is leading the charge is up to you. Don’t let them take away your constitutional rights. Weaponization of politics is here in many forms and Rank Choice Voting has had its veil lifted. Stand and be counted!