Two Republican lawmakers who wanted to make ballot measures easier to understand thought their bill stood a good chance.
The League of Women Voters, the county clerks and AARP supported House Bill 1024.
Rep. Lois Court, a Denver Democrat known for fighting for fair elections, backed the measure.
And Senate Democrats themselves last year lamented a Georgia State University study that concluded Colorado’s ballot measures were difficult to understand.
But the bill — which required that ballot-measure titles be written in plain language — died this week on a party-line vote in a Democratic-controlled Senate committee after testimony by a leading Democratic attorney, Ed Ramey.
“I’m very disappointed,” said the House sponsor, Rep. Libby Szabo of Arvada. “It seems like a common-sense bill. If we’re going to ask the people of Colorado to vote, they should understand what they’re voting for.”
Ramey said Colorado law already encourages proponents of a ballot measure to keep it simple, and to write in “plain non-technical language in a clear and coherent manner using words with common and everyday meaning, which are understandable to the average reader.”
Ramey — whose law partner is Mark Grueskin, one of the masterminds behind Democratic victories last year in redrawing congressional boundaries — said HB 1024 dealt with making ballot titles understood. But Ramey said titles must accurately reflect the ballot measure itself, even if that language is “technical or convoluted or driven by someone’s agenda.”
Szabo said she was inspired to run the measure after talking to voters who admitted they didn’t understand many ballot measures.
Her bill, which was co-sponsored by Sen. Nancy Spence of Centennial, had earlier passed the Republican-controlled House.
Spence told the committee chairman, Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, that she ran the language of the school-tax measure he put on the ballot last November through what are called “readability calculators.” One scored the measure as “very difficult to read,” while two others determined it was best understood by someone who had taken post-college classes.
“I thought we did a pretty good job of making it as simple as we could given the circumstances, because it was very complicated,” Heath said.
Lynn Bartels: 303-954-5327 or lbartels@denverpost.com
