A state constitutional amendment to make it harder to amend the Colorado Constitution will appear on the November ballot, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office announced Tuesday.
Backers of the “Raise the Bar” campaign submitted nearly 184,000 signatures on Aug. 5. A 5 percent random sample of the signatures projected the number of valid signatures to be greater than 110 percent of the total number of signatures required for placement on the ballot, the secretary of state said.
The initiative will be called Amendment 71 on the ballot.
“Coloradans are tired of seeing their constitution pummeled with the latest fad ideas and bloated with permanent, unworkable schemes,” campaign co-chair and Summit County Commissioner Dan Gibbs said. “The voices throughout Colorado agree, itap time to raise the bar and make it more difficult to amend our constitution.”
Amendment 71 proposes that for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments to make the ballot, they must be signed by at least 2 percent of the registered electors in each of the 35 state senate districts. There’s no such geographic requirement now. Organizers must gather 98,492 valid signatures to get an amendment on the ballot.
The amendment would require that any proposed constitutional amendment receive 55 percent of the ballots cast to be ratified. Currently it is a simple majority.
One difference would be whether the proposed amendment would only repeal a provision of the constitution, in which case a simple majority would suffice.
Supporters say it’s to amend the constitution. For example, of 26 states that have initiative or referendum processes, only 14 — including Colorado — allow qualifying initiatives to go directly to the ballot, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In a number of states, initiatives are submitted to the legislature.
Many states require more signatures to be gathered than Colorado does, while others require up to 60 percent of approval for constitutional amendments.
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Opponents say the financial cost to gather sufficient signatures, which can exceed $1 million, already establishes a sufficient burden for putting constitutional amendments on the ballot in Colorado.
Four citizen initiatives have now been approved by the Colorado secretary of state to make the ballot. Already cleared for the ballot are the proposed ColoradoCare , a proposal to to $12 an hour by 2020 and an to take prescribed drug to cause their deaths.
Petitions are still being counted in five other ballot measures, including creation of a presidential primary, a separate proposal to allow unaffiliated voters in party primaries, mandatory setbacks from oil and gas operations, local government authority over oil and gas operations and new tobacco taxes.
Two measures were referred to the ballot by the General Assembly: Amendment T, which would remove a reference to slavery in the state constitution, and Amendment U, a property tax exemption for interest earnings of less than $6,000 off of leasing government property.
