POCATELLO — A unanimous Bannock County Commission on Tuesday postponed a proposal to consolidate county voting precincts until after the November election.

Testimony from both Republican and Democratic leaders coupled with comments offered by county elections officials prompted the commission’s decision to delay the proposal to eliminate 24 of Bannock County’s 58 voting precincts.

The precincts are geographic boundaries used to help organize elections and they also determine the polling locations at which residents will vote.

The commissioners’ proposal would essentially consolidate the current precincts into fewer precincts covering larger geographic areas of the county and each of the new precincts would as a result have many more registered voters assigned to it.

“I’m partly for the proposal but not 100 percent,” Bannock County Republican Party Chairman Lance Kolbet said during a Tuesday phone interview. “There were a number of people who came out against it and in fact, I didn’t see anybody talking in favor of it at all — and part of that was the lack of transparency.”

A petition against the elimination of the precincts has been started on the website change.org and as of Tuesday night it had 464 supporters.

Idaho law puts the authority to redraw precinct boundary lines with county commissioners.

According to Evan Frasure, Bannock County Commission chairman, previous Bannock County commissions held private meetings with constituents from both major political parties on any potential boundary changes.

Frasure said the end result of such collaborations were often precinct boundaries that did not conform to state law.

Precinct lines should follow distinct physical features like roads, rivers and other tangible identifiers.

Instead, the existing boundaries in Bannock County rely on imaginary lines, some of which stretch through empty pastures, cut certain streets in half down the middle and, according to Frasure, were drawn with no inkling of understandable reasoning.

“We want to protect voters’ rights and we want to avoid voter suppression,” Frasure said during a Tuesday phone interview. “The whole purpose of this proposal is to make it easier and more convenient for the average voter to show up on election day and vote.”

When deciding what Bannock County precinct boundaries to adjust, Frasure said he used Ada County’s rule of having no more than 1,600 registered voters per precinct as a baseline.

Under the new proposal, no precinct in Bannock County would exceed 1,500 registered voters. As it stands now, some of the 58 precincts in the county have less than 300 registered voters.

Also, rather than using one voting location for several precincts — like the Red Lion Hotel in Pocatello which serves as the polling place for seven precincts — the new plan would give each precinct its own voting location that would not be shared with any other precincts.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to stack three or four or seven precincts in one (voting) location,” Frasure said. “These people have a difficult time trying to vote in one place.”

But under the Bannock County commissioners’ plan there would be fewer precincts each with more voters casting ballots at each polling place.

The difficulty associated with reducing the number of voting precincts is anticipating how the changes will affect the lines of people waiting to cast their ballots on election day.

However, it’s almost impossible to anticipate how many voters will turn out for elections every year and from which precincts.

For Bannock County Clerk Robert Poleki, that’s partly what’s wrong with Frasure’s proposal.

“What he’s doing is he is basing these lines on voter turnout,” Poleki said. “We can’t do that because we don’t know how voter turnout will change from year to year. We need to base these changes on how many registered voters there are in each precinct.”

Frasure said he has considered the number of registered voters in each precinct. But he’s also attempting to predict how many people will actually vote.

While Poleki said he supports the decision to postpone the proposal, he believes much more work remains.

“People made the recommendation that we need to get a committee together that represents all political parties and the elections office,” Poleki said about the Tuesday meeting. “We administer the elections in this county and the commissioners need our input. Yes, the commissioners have the authority to change these lines but they don’t have the authority to administer elections.”

Poleki continued, “Every citizen has a right to vote and I will not understaff a polling location.”

Kolbet also credited Frasure for the amount of work he put into drawing the new boundary lines, but said Frasure’s decision to unilaterally redraw the lines without consulting either political party or the elections office opened the proposal to pushback.

“The part that concerned me the most is that when you reduce the number of precincts we are talking about altering political divisions,” Kolbet said. “You would probably want the two largest stakeholders at the table. If anybody should have been involved it would have been the Democratic county chairman and the Republican county chairman.”

But including all the interested parties would convolute the process, according to Frasure. And while he is open to receiving and incorporating feedback from concerned groups, Frasure said he would not consider implementing a committee in a private setting.

“The commission is tasked with drawing these lines and we will certainly take some input,” Frasure said. “We plan on sticking with the law and keeping them legal. We want a clean plan that is acceptable to the voters of Bannock County. We want to encourage as many people to vote as possible and we’re not trying to hide anything.”

Frasure continued, “This isn’t for the convenience of the (political) parties. We are solely looking at the convenience of the voter on election day.”