now
goes to the polls to vote its preferences in the
Idaho Presidential Primary.Joining Idaho on Tuesday, March 8 will be Hawaii, Michigan, and Mississippi, three other states that will also hold presidential primaries on Tuesday.
Please be aware that the primary voting in Idaho on March 8 is for the Republican Party and the Constitution Party only. The Democratic Party will hold county caucuses on March 22.
Republicans going to the polls on Tuesday will find 13 names on the primary ballot, although currently only four of those candidates actually remain in the running. The 13 listed on the Republican ballot include, in the order they are listed on the ballot:
• Mike Huckabee
• John R. Kasich
• Peter Messina
• Rand Paul
• Marco Rubio
• Rick Santorum
• Donald J. Trump
• Jeb Bush
• Ben Carson
• Chris Christie
• Ted Cruz
• Carly Fiorina
• Lindsey Graham
To see a sample of the official ballot for the Republican Party Presidential Primary, click here.
The Constitution Party ballot lists three names to select from in their Presidential Primary. Those names, in the order they are listed on the ballot, are:
• Scott Copeland
• J.R. Myers
• Patrick Anthony Ockander
To see a sample of the official ballot for the Constitution Party Presidential Primary, click here.
Idaho sends 32 delegates to the Republican National Convention, which will be held July 18-21 in Cleveland, Ohio. To collect any of those Idaho delegates, a Republican candidate must win at least 20% of the vote. If any candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, that candidate gets all 32 delegates.
Republican delegates up for grabs in the other states voting that day: Hawaii sends 19 delegates, Michigan sends 148 delegates, and Mississippi sends 41 delegates to the convention.
The polls open in Boundary County at 8:00 a.m., and remain open until 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8.
If you took a peek at the sample ballots shown at the links above, you would see that the ballots this year
look
very different from ballots used in Boundary
County elections in the past. That is because
this is the first election where Boundary County
will employ its seven newly acquired DS 200
Precinct Tabulation Scanners, which are
electronic vote scanners and tabulators. County
election officials are estimating that, with
these new scanners, they will be able to fully
tabulate all votes by 9:30 or 10:00 p.m. on
election night, much improved from the past when
election officials often were up sometimes until
4:00 a.m. counting votes under the previous
hand-marked ballot system.If you would like the full details on the acquisition and cost of the new electronic vote scanners, how they work, and lots of other information on these devices, take a look at our NewsBF story on the new scanners from last January by clicking here.
Idaho's most recent Presidential Primary was held back in 2008. In that primary, 1,466 Republican voters turned out to participate in Boundary County. It will be interesting to see if that number is affected at all by this year's hotly contested primary race.
Idaho voters will go to the polls again in two months on May 17 for another primary election. The May 17 primary will be held to select candidates for federal, statewide, legislative, judicial, and county offices.