After 40 years in state government, Ben Ysursa has some strong opinions about how things ought to work in Idaho – and how, on occasion, they have. For example, when both of the state's political parties came together, working side by side, they successfully passed a ballot measure to create the College of Western Idaho, now the state's fastest-growing community college.

“It was just gratifying to see it,” Ysursa said. “We need to get a cause like that again, that we can all agree on and go forward with. … It was a good joint effort to see how things can work when politics is out of it, so to speak.”

Another example he points to is election-day voter registration. Idaho’s one of just eight states that allows voters to register at the polls on Election Day. The reason: When Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1994, it required states to follow an array of new federal rules about voter registration, including keeping voters on the rolls for eight years even if they don’t vote.

“Idaho was going to have some real out-of-date lists and things of that nature,” Ysursa said. But Ysursa, an attorney and then chief deputy secretary of state, discovered that if Idaho enacted election-day registration, it’d be exempt from all the other rules.

“It was: Do we have a federal mandate, or do we want to run our own elections?” Ysursa recalled. Both parties liked the idea, he said. “Both Republicans and Democrats thought election-day registration was a good idea, was going to get more of their folks registered. Our office and the clerks saw it as a way of making Idaho run Idaho elections, and not have the federal intrusion.” You can read my full Sunday story here at spokesman.com on Ysursa’s reflections on his career, as he prepares to retire from office as the state’s longtime Secretary of State.

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