This week, the county clerk of Wallowa County approved the circulation of an official petition to force a Greater Idaho ballot initiative onto a Wallowa County ballot. County voters will get to have a voice on the Greater Idaho issue this November if 242 valid signatures are gathered and submitted by early August.
The effort is intended to be a signal to state legislators, as its actual effect is only to require county commissioners to meet twice a year to discuss the issue of moving the Oregon/Idaho border to include rural Oregon into Idaho. A copy of the petition on greateridaho.org reads “to discuss how to promote the interests of Wallowa County that would be relevant to a relocation of state borders, and to prepare the county for becoming a county of another state.”
Wallowa county came forty votes short of approving a similar measure in November 2020, although neighboring Union County approved the measure then. So far, eight counties in eastern Oregon have approved Greater Idaho ballot measures. Three counties in southern Oregon will vote on the issue next month. The leader of the Greater Idaho movement, Mike McCarter said, “we hardly spent anything on our 2020 campaign, and voters didn’t even know what they were voting on. This year voters will get a better chance to hear about how much better Idaho’s low-tax, conservative governance is than Oregon’s governance.”
The Greater Idaho movement is collecting signatures in Morrow County and expects to begin collecting signatures in Umatilla County by Summer, McCarter said.
“The location of state borders is arbitrary. The current location of the Oregon/Idaho border doesn’t match the real cultural boundary. The majority of southern and eastern Oregon votes for conservative governance like Idaho has. It’s better to move the border than to ask all of those half a million Oregonians to move to Idaho,” he said.
The petition can be viewed here: www.greateridaho.org/petitions-to-put-greater-idaho-on-the-ballot
