A citizens group has filed a complaint seeking to knock the anti-affirmative-action initiative off November’s ballot, claiming that more than half the signatures gathered on petitions are invalid.
The group “Vote No on 46,” led by former Small Business Administration-Colorado director Patricia Barela Rivera, says it spent the past month analyzing most of the 128,000 signatures on petitions that ask voters to abolish affirmative-action laws in Colorado.
Secretary of State Mike Coffman, whose office looked at a random sample of the signatures, ruled late last month that the petitions had enough valid signatures to be placed on the ballot as Amendment 46.
But Rivera’s group challenged more than 69,000 of the signatures on various grounds. Those challenges include that some petition circulators were not Colorado residents, that some circulators didn’t live at the addresses listed on their signed petitions, that several notaries public who verified the petitions did not have current licenses, that many of the voter signatures didn’t match current-voter files and that nearly 5,000 people signed the petitions twice.
