Trusted With the Question

Trusted With the Question

August 24, 2026

In 1911, the Idaho legislature submitted a constitutional amendment giving citizens the power to propose laws through the ballot initiative process, and voters ratified it the following year. But the amendment did not specify how many signatures an initiative would require, and no petition could reach the ballot until the legislature set that number. This did not happen until 1933. For twenty-one years, Idahoans held a formal right to propose laws and could not use it.

When the chance came to exercise the citizen-led ballot initiative, the first people to test it had spent years trying to pass a law in the Statehouse. Idaho’s fish and wildlife had been managed by a state game warden, usually a political appointee who might not know anything about wildlife. Sportsmen’s clubs had asked the legislature to change this and gotten nowhere. The sportsmen continued meeting at Kelly’s Club in Boise. When the state game warden complained that “poachers” were trying to take away his job, they took the name. The Poachers Club still exists. 

Having lost in the Statehouse, the group tried the path the 1933 law had finally opened. The law required 21,000 signatures from registered voters, and they had seven weeks to gather them across a state of farm towns and mountain valleys. No one could do that work at a distance. It meant standing before strangers and explaining their proposal in plain words. They did just this, and on July 7, 1938, R.G. Cole, Homer Martin, and Dan McGrath delivered the petitions with 24,000 names. That November, voters overwhelmingly approved the measure three to one, and management of Idaho’s wildlife passed into the hands of a commission that still serves Idaho today. 

Ten years later, the world gave words to a principle those signatures had already embodied. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that everyone has the right to take part in the government of their country, and that the will of the people is the basis of governmental authority. A right that cannot be exercised does not meet that standard. Neither does one held only by those whom someone else has approved. The 24,000 Idahoans who signed that petition were not screened first. They read it and signed their names. The process rests on the assumption that ordinary people can be trusted to judge the laws they live under.

That assumption is being challenged. In 2021, Idaho enacted stricter requirements by mandating that organizers collect signatures from every one of the state’s thirty-five legislative districts. A unanimous Idaho Supreme Court subsequently struck down this law, restoring the prior rule requiring signatures from eighteen districts. The court found no evidence that Idahoans had misused the initiative process. The historical record also reveals a recurring pattern in which the legislature has responded to successful citizen initiatives by imposing additional restrictions. New requirements followed the term-limits initiative voters passed in 1994. More came in 2013, after voters overturned a package of education laws the legislature had enacted. In 2025, legislatures in five states, including Idaho, sent voters proposals to make ballot measures harder to qualify or to remove certain subjects from citizen reach entirely. 

A farmer near Grangeville, a nurse in Nampa, a retired teacher in Sandpoint: the initiative process assumes each can understand a proposal, consider it thoughtfully, discuss it with neighbors, and reach a judgment worth counting. Arguments for narrowing the process often rest, explicitly or implicitly, on a diminished view of voters — that people are too easily confused, too easily bought, too easily led. Honoring the dignity of all people means trusting them to help decide the laws they live under.

The initiative itself guarantees no particular result. Initiatives have expanded rights and restricted them. Participation does not guarantee agreement, either. What this process makes possible is something more fundamental: questions the legislature has ignored or closed remain open for public deliberation. It gives ordinary citizens a direct way to bring those questions before their fellow citizens and ask them to consider what the law should be. This means anyone willing to do the work of engaging with their neighbors can participate directly in lawmaking. 

On a July morning in 1938, Cole, Martin, and McGrath delivered pages filled with 24,000 handwritten names. Somewhere in Idaho today, someone is standing on a doorstep with a clipboard, asking a neighbor to talk. The people holding those clipboards are not so different from the people who carried those petitions nearly ninety years ago. This is not just the persistence of history. It is the foundation of self-government. The initiative process exists because ordinary citizens demanded their voices be heard, and it endures only if we keep trusting one another with that responsibility. In every era, those with power have found reasons to narrow the circle of participation. But when we honor the dignity and judgment of our neighbors, we keep democracy alive — one invitation, one conversation, one signature at a time.