FILE - The Wallowa County Courthouse in 2022, Enterprise, Ore.
Antonio Sierra / OPB
Three years after Wallowa County residents voted to require their public officials to talk about how to leave Oregon and join Idaho, they ended the practice in a landslide in Tuesday’s primary election, unofficial results show.
With a 61% turnout rate, a ballot measure will end the county’s participation in a movement known as Greater Idaho, which required its board of commissioners to meet regularly about moving Idaho’s borders to encompass politically conservative areas of Eastern Oregon.
Since 2020, the group, Citizens for Greater Idaho, has successfully campaigned for voters to pass ballot measures in support of this cause in 13 counties east of the Cascades. Wallowa passed one such measure by razor-thin margins in 2023. Greater Idaho organizers hoped the local support would pressure the Oregon and Idaho legislatures to act on its agenda, but lawmakers have repeatedly nixed the idea.
Wallowa County’s participation never sat right with resident Shawna Jannuzzi. She started talking about the idea of repealing the 2023 measure with other members of the Wallowa County Democratic Party more than a year ago. Those discussions eventually spun off into a volunteer group that circulated a petition.
With only about one in six Wallowa County voters registered as Democrats, Jannuzzi said she knew she would have to appeal to people across the political spectrum. She attended a voter forum in April where she included a conservative argument for repealing the ordinance.
“A lot of conservative people, they care about where our taxpayer money is going, so that was a talking point,” she said. “They also care that we’re not wasting our time on measures that will not be passed at any point.”
Matt McCaw, the executive director of Citizens for Greater Idaho, said that the repeal’s success only showed that residents were ready to end the meetings, rather than a total rejection of the movement’s message.
“We’re not surprised and we completely understand why the voters, after years of asking their legislature to act, would say, ‘They’re not going to act. We’re not going to continue these meetings,’” he said.
Without support from the Oregon Legislature to move the state’s borders, McCaw said Greater Idaho is pivoting from local ballot measures to directly lobbying the Trump administration to look at the issue nationally. He said Greater Idaho isn’t alone in wanting to change borders so that rural, conservative voters aren’t lumped into Democratic-controlled state governments. Similar initiatives are happening in Illinois, Virginia, and New Mexico.
Jannuzzi said she hopes the vote in Wallowa County will inspire other Eastern Oregon counties to drop their Greater Idaho meeting requirements. Votes have happened elsewhere and the results have been mixed. In 2024, Harney County voted to end its Greater Idaho meetings while neighboring Malheur County voted to continue its own.
