The following Guest Editorial has been submitted to mainstream media and conservative media outlets across Idaho.
Ranked Choice Voting a Threat to Idaho Gun Rights
A new threat to Idaho gun rights has emerged: Ranked Choice Voting.
.
Typically, Idahoans are focused on what is happening in Washington, D.C. for threats to gun rights. President Joe Biden and Congressmen are constantly attacking the 2nd Amendment and calling for greater and greater infringements on the right to keep and bear arms.
But Idahoans aren’t usually worried about threats to gun rights coming from our own state.
Idaho is one of the top states in the country for gun rights. Although it wasn’t always that way. When I founded the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance in 2012, Guns and Ammo Magazine ranked Idaho 32nd in the nation. Now, we rank in the top five every year.
I don’t know about you, but I want to keep it that way. We have a massive influx of political refugees as well who just left states where gun rights have been decimated. They don’t want to see Idaho go down the same path.
However, liberals in Idaho, frustrated by their inability to turn Idaho into the next California, are launching a last-ditch effort to upend Idaho’s current election system by implementing RCV. “But RCV doesn’t have anything to do with gun rights,” the proponents are going to tell you. Directly, it does not. However, indirectly, RCV 100% poses a major threat to the right to keep and bear arms.
The far-left extremists who are pushing RCV will tell you it’s about “fairness,” “turnout,” and other nonsense excuses for upending hundreds of years of “one person, one vote” elections.
I won’t get into the details and the mountain of reasons that RCV is a terrible election system. Let’s set all that aside and focus on what the organizers are really trying to do.
A few months ago, I spoke with one of Reclaim Idaho’s volunteers at a signature collection location in Idaho Falls. She didn’t know who I was, but I asked her about the effort and what they wanted to get done. After the usual pitch she was used to doing, she ultimately admitted that it would help Democrats and it would make Idaho more “moderate,” or in other words, more liberal.
That Reclaim Idaho volunteer knows that passing more solid pro-2nd Amendment legislation will be much more difficult after RCV is implemented. She also knows that implementing RCV will make passing gun control much easier. She knows that conservatives will lose at the ballot box under RCV.
The real objective of liberals and far-left extremists pushing RCV is to make Idaho more like California, get rid of conservative lawmakers, and allow Democrats to choose who should be a Republican nominee for elected office in Idaho.
And once they have achieved those objectives, gun rights are on the chopping block. They’ll tell you it isn’t, but the reality is, in places like Oregon, Washington, and California, once the liberals took over, the 2nd Amendment was one of their top targets.
Do we really think that Idaho won’t suffer the same fate if liberals use RCV to take over the Idaho statehouse?
Do you enjoy Stand Your Ground, Constitutional Carry, Campus Carry, and other pro-gun laws in Idaho? If so, RCV threatens those pro-gun laws.
Do you oppose things like Red Flag Gun Confiscation Orders, bans on certain types of guns or ammo, and other unconstitutional gun control measures? RCV will make those things a lot easier to implement.
RCV is a threat to gun rights, so ignore the gaslighting that it isn’t.