This year’s “blue book,” the little pamphlet that analyzes the pros and cons and content of ballot issues, probably won’t be so little. It could well be thicker than a deep-dish pizza, and it won’t be nearly as appetizing.
Coloradans could face a daunting number of ballot issues next Nov. 7 – the most since 1992, when 13 proposals jammed the ballot. This year, as many as 18 statewide issues could be facing voters, an intimidating and confusing prospect.
The list includes five ballot issues put there by the legislature and two citizen initiatives that already have qualified. Petitions for at least seven other statewide issues are circulating among us now, carried by eager signature-hunters who collect a buck or three for every plebiscite-loving small-d democrat they can persuade to put ink to paper.
Secretary of State Gigi Dennis anticipates eight to 10 citizen initiatives will qualify for the statewide ballot. Three latecomers could be added, including term limits for judges and a couple of proposals to increase state tax refunds. And that doesn’t include all the possibilities for local ballot issues that also will be crowding the ballot.
Initiatives mean a lot of work for the secretary of state’s office, especially the logjam of signature-checking after the Aug. 7 deadline for turning in petitions. Each ballot issue must have 68,000 valid signatures; to be safe, most circulators collect 90,000 or 100,000. A representative sample of 5 percent is checked. On top of that, there are 25 candidate petitions to be scrutinized.
That isn’t the only reason Dennis is less than enthusiastic about the petition thing. When she was in the legislature, as a Republican from Pueblo West, she favored several unsuccessful attempts to control the process, or at least to make it harder to amend the constitution than to amend state laws.
It’s not only that this rampant ballot access confuses voters, Dennis says; it’s also that “the voters are at risk of turning us into a true democracy when we are a republic. I don’t think it’s appropriate that you tie up things like tax policy in our constitution.
“I swore on the Bible to uphold the constitution,” Dennis said, “but you won’t find me signing many petitions.”
At least there won’t be, as had seemed possible earlier, four competing marriage proposals (so to speak). Two, maybe. One will be a legislative referendum on domestic partner benefits. The other, though it’s not certain until the signatures are in and verified, will be a citizen initiative defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
If both were to pass, the issue with the most votes would supersede the other in instances where the two conflict. A precedent is 1974, when voters approved both the Poundstone amendment, making municipal annexation more difficult, and a legislative referendum on setting municipal boundaries. Poundstone prevailed because it had more total votes even though its margin of approval was smaller.
The other legislative referendums on the ballot include proposed changes in recall election procedures, a property tax break for disabled veterans, the annual effort to weed out newly discovered obsolete provisions from the constitution and a confusing pre-emptive strike against an initiative that requires 65 percent of schools’ operating budgets to be spent on actual instruction. Both contain the 65 percent requirement, but legislators consider their referendum more thoughtful and thus less problematic. If both pass, the Poundstone test applies.
The other initiative that already has qualified would make it easier to put even more issues on the ballot. It would lower the number of signatures required, open more government decisions to voting and make it harder to change voter-approved laws.
This sounds like a good idea to Paul Jacob, president of Virginia-based Citizens in Charge.
“I love the initiative process,” says Jacob, who disagrees that it has been abused by moneyed interests. In fact, he says, the more restrictive the petition process, the harder it is for “ordinary citizens” to get on the ballot – which leaves the field open for the well-financed ax-grinders.
Only 24 states give their citizens this kind of direct access to both constitution and statute books. Oregon historically has the most ballot issues, followed by California. Colorado is third.
Ballot issues may be more important than politicians. Candidates who are elected can serve only eight years, thanks to term limits – another ballot issue. But once an initiative passes, it’s almost impossible to change it. Referendum C last November was an exception. It put a five-year moratorium on the revenue-limiting provisions of the 1992 TABOR amendment.
Possibly cutting the number of marriage amendments from four to two removes some of this year’s potential confusion, but there’s still plenty of befuddlement to go around. That includes confusion about what realistically still has a chance of making it to the ballot.
In addition to the marriage definition, there are six other petitions circulating.
One attempts to deny state, county and city services to illegal immigrants. But it would not supersede federal law requiring access to education and medical emergency services, and it may have a tough time in court.
There’s a petition to restrict condemnation proceedings. There are proposals to outlaw late-term abortions, to guarantee the right of workers to unionize, to legalize possession of marijuana statewide and to limit metro-area housing growth.
There had been talk of citizens taking to the streets with petitions to refute several legislative and executive decisions. To revive, for example, the vetoed bill on emergency contraception, to reverse the July 1 smoking ban, or to establish tougher ethics rules than the legislature passed. Common Cause is still thinking about the ethics proposal, but the others are on a back burner at best. And not all of the petitions in circulation will succeed. Still, it’s quite a list.
“It’s a great thing,” says Jacob, of Citizens in Charge. “I’m afraid it’s also a sign that folks are not thrilled with their legislatures.”
Fred Brown, a retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post and a political analyst for 9News, can be reached at punditfwb@aol.com. For more information, go to leg.state.co.us and click on Ballot Issues on the left side of the page.
