Students interviewed by the Argonaut offering mixed feelings on the results of ballot questions regarding legislative power and making English the official language of Idaho.
In interviews with students, at least one question was mentioned as ridiculous and a funny thing to see on the ballot.
The house advisory question of which firearm should be the State Gun of Idaho was a topic that seemed to invoke laughter among those interviewed. On this question, Idaho voters chose the Winchester Model 1873 “Gun that Won the West” with 31 percent of votes, about 6 points over the next most popular option.
One UI student, Sara Alnajdi, commented, “Regarding the gun one, I was very taken aback by that question because I thought ‘We don’t need a state gun.’ I don’t know why that was a question that was on there. I thought it was a little ridiculous … I remember that I didn’t know if I had the option to leave it blank on the gun one, so I just ended up circling a really random gun.”
Another UI student, Wyatt Curl, was only able to vote in Washington this year but provided his thoughts on the options. “… I just think it’s really funny to see that on a ballot … I think a lot of the ones on there were older, right? I mean, I am not familiar with Idaho History, but to me none of these firearms make any sense to be the state gun because none of them were made in Idaho. You can look at the state bird, or the state tree, like, ‘Oh, they’re all found in Idaho,’ but none of these were made in Idaho. A lot of these were really prevalent in the East Coast.” Curl particularly was amused by the inclusion of the M1 Garand as an option.
Voter turnout in Latah County sat at 65 percent of registered voters, with 15,765 ballots recorded out of 24,146 registered voters.
Students generally agreed with the results of House Joint Resolution 4, which was voted down 66.2% to 33.7%, which would have taken the right to put forth ballot initiatives on cannabis and other narcotics out of the hands of voters and given it solely to the state legislature.
Both respondents seemed at least mildly against the notion of losing voter input on narcotics legislation. Alnajdi said that she was, “a bit more indifferent about that… I’m not sure if legislatures should be the only ones deciding that.”
Other questions, however, were received with more mixed opinions. Among these other ballot measures (House Joint Resolution 6) was the designation of English as the official constitutional language of Idaho, which passed 63.1% to 36.8.%
Some students had opinions similar to Curl, who said that “I’m not really sure what the actual ramifications of that would be. It kind of seems more like a ceremonial thing more than anything else … I think for something like that if it has actual ramifications, I think it is actually a very good thing for things like transportation and agriculture and safety standards and all that. If you don’t actually understand English, you can’t read road signs and that’s a problem. Having an official language that you are expected to at least have a basic understanding of makes sense.”
Alnajdi was more skeptical, saying, “English is probably primarily used, but I don’t think that there should be an official language for Idaho or even the US in general, because there’s not just people who only speak English. There are those who speak different languages here in America.”
Riley Thompson can be reached at arg-news.uidaho.edu