This sort of thing can happen easily enough anywhere, and you have to give Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa credit for stepping up, declining to prevaricate and declaring simply: “We got conned.”
That was done by a federal prison inmate in Texas named Keith Russell Judd, who filed a notorized form and $1,000 to secure a place on the Idaho ballot – for president, on the Democratic side.
It doesn’t matter practically much, as Ysura pointed out: Idaho Democrats register their choice for president by caucus, and the primary vote will be irrelevant anyway.
But maybe this does help make the case for a suggestion we’ve mulled for some years: Require that all candidates for the ballot have to submit at least some reasonable number of petition signatures along with the declaration form and filing fee. Might cut down on the number of California residents (see the ballot in the 1st district) and prison inmates hitting the Idaho ballot. As a news story on the Judd case said, “A key reason Judd was able to make the ballot was a recent change in state election law that eliminated a requirement under which he would have had to get signatures from more than 3,000 Idaho citizens.”
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