DENVER—Ballot campaigns would only be able to hire Colorado residents to collect petition signatures under a new bill released Wednesday.
The proposal (House Bill 1406) would also require organizers to report how much they paid signature gatherers and all petition groups, whether they use paid employees or volunteers, would have to pledge that they told them not to lie or mislead voters in gathering signatures.
“It’s a shot across the bow at these mercenary-type groups that work across the country,” bill sponsor House Majority Leader Alice Madden said.
Madden, D-Boulder, said the bill isn’t a response to the controversy surrounding this year’s ballot proposal to ban affirmative action in state government and higher education but she said it’s a good example of why the changes are needed. She said there have been complaints every year by people who feel they were misled into signing petitions.
A group opposing the initiative says petition circulators collected signatures at Denver’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day march and elsewhere, telling potential signers the measure would end discrimination. They didn’t always mention it would scrap some affirmative action provisions.
Supporters, including former University of California regent Ward Connerly, have gathered enough signatures to get the proposal on this fall’s ballot but three formal complaints against petition signatures will be considered by an administrative law judge in July.
Whether the proposal remains on the ballot depends on what the judge decides, said Rich Coolidge, a spokesman for Secretary of State Mike Coffman. If the judge finds that a signature gatherer intentionally misled voters, Coolidge said all the pages collected by that person could be thrown out.
Connerly said he doesn’t think the ballot proposal is at risk and doesn’t think anyone was mislead. He said the ballot proposal, called the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, would end discrimination by ending preferential treatment based on race. He said it wouldn’t end affirmative action because it would still allow, for example, a university to have an outreach program to attract black students as long as students of other races weren’t excluded.
He said petition gatherers shouldn’t mislead people but he thinks figuring out what is and isn’t a lie in a political campaign will be difficult to prove.
“A lot of the things they regard as deception are simply differences of opinion about a policy decision,” Connerly said referring to the affirmative action debate.
Linda Meric, co-chair of Colorado Unity, a civil rights group which opposes the measure, said it is a lie to say the proposal supports affirmative action because similar measures backed by Connerly in other states have ended up barring outreach, mentoring and training for women and minorities in contracting and education. Meric said she’s heard dozens of complaints from people who said they were told the initiative would prevent a nonexistent federal discrimination law from expiring and it would protect gays and lesbians.
Connerly said about half the signature gatherers hired for his initiative were out-of-state workers who travel across the country working on ballot proposals. He said they were told what the initiative did and told not to lie. He acknowledged that experience teaches them how to target their message to different kinds of people and there’s no way to control what they say on the street.
The proposal as introduced would only punish petition organizers for failing to tell workers not to lie. Madden said she planned to change the bill to also punish signature gatherers who lie or mislead voters.
