I was a little surprised last week when I opened the mailbox and saw my statewide “blue book.” Instead of the traditional compact voting guide, it’s been enlarged to the 8.5-by-11-inch format and grown to 164 pages. Who’s ever going to read this stuff? Two days later, I received a second one, just for the ballot issues in Denver.
It will only get worse under Amendment 38. Allowing for a dozen issues each for the state, county, city, a half- dozen for the school district, and a couple each for the Stadium District, RTD and Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the blue book in 2008 would be bigger than Denver’s Yellow Pages.
Unfortunately, Amendment 38 discards most of the current format whereby Legislative Council interviews the parties on each side of the ballot issue and writes an unbiased, insightful analysis of what each issue will do, two or three factual arguments presented for each side, and the fiscal impact to taxpayers.
Instead, that format is replaced with an unedited, 1,000-word argument written by each side. It wouldn’t be any different than all the claims made in this month’s political TV ads, except that the exaggerations and misrepresentations would be 10 times lengthier. Imagine reading through 100 or more of those essays in preparation for deciding all the new state and local laws appearing on November ballots.
Amendment 38 is an end-around to the voter-approved single-subject law. In 1994, voters approved by a 70 percent majority a law to eliminate the growing practice of hiding eight or nine unrelated subjects inside a single ballot measure containing a popular topic.
Since then, these perpetual petitioners have submitted more than 200 ballot titles containing multiple subjects, all of which were thrown out by the Title Board or the courts. These petitioners responded by writing a provision into Amendment 38 requiring that all single-subject challenges can only be filed with the Colorado Supreme Court and that the court must rule on them within seven days.
But Amendment 38 applies to 3,100 units of government. When just a fraction of them face single-subject challenges, the Supreme Court will be deluged with hundreds of challenges requiring resolution within seven days.
If the court can’t handle the workload within seven days, the multiple- subject issue is automatically ruled valid.
Amendment 38 obstructs the verification of petition signatures. Routinely, one-third of all petition signers are not registered to vote in Colorado. Their signatures don’t count. That’s why all seven initiatives appearing on this November’s ballot walked in with petitions containing more than 100,000 signatures to ensure they had 68,000 that were valid. The secretary of state then had 30 days to check those 100,000 signatures against the voter rolls.
Under Amendment 38, they can’t do that anymore. Specific in the language of Amendment 38 is only the district court can validate a signature, and it has only 10 days to check the signatures before rendering a verdict. Now all of the signatures turned in to the secretary of state, 64 counties, 271 municipalities, 178 school districts and 2,700 special districts can be checked and verified only by 22 district courts. And in 10 days – not 30 – or the measure automatically gets placed on the ballot. It’s unreasonable to presume that the criminal and civil cases will take a back seat to all of this, meaning petition signatures won’t be verified.
Amendment 38 removes all of the safeguards protecting the initiative and referendum process voted in by the electorate in 1911 and amended by statewide voters in 1994. It renders the blue book meaningless. The single-subject requirement. The verification of legitimate signatures. It’s all meaningless.
Worse, they stick the taxpayers with the responsibility for printing up hundreds of these petitions and delivering them to the sponsors. Then taxpayers pay to print and mail an unedited advertisement on the sponsor’s behalf to every registered voter, on every ballot issue.
No wonder this issue lost twice before, in 1994 and 1996. No wonder it lost each time by huge margins. The only wonder is, if the current system is so unfair, how did it manage to get back on the ballot again?
Rick Reiter is director of Coloradans For Responsible Reform, the business and civic coalition opposing Amendment 38.
