A Colorado conservative group filed a federal lawsuit against the Secretary of State and Gov. Jared Polis on Monday, challenging that requires tax-cutting ballot measures warn voters about the potential impact of lost revenue.
Advance Colorado, together with several individual residents, argue that the law violates the First Amendment and forces groups promoting certain ballot measures to accept language that the groups may disagree with. Advance Colorado has been approved to gather signatures for two tax-cutting ballot measures this year, and it argued that the warning label it must present to voters doesn’t accurately reflect the impact those tax cuts would have on state funding.
The law passed in 2021, and it requires that any ballot measure that proposes to cut taxes also include language noting that the proposal would reduce state funding for specific programs like education or health care. One of Advance Colorado’s initiatives, for instance, would cut the sales tax. State regulators required the initiative to note that, if passed, it would “reduce funding for state expenditures that include but are not limited to education, health care policy and financing, and higher education by an estimated $17.7 million in tax revenue.”
But Advance Colorado argued that its initiative won’t hurt any state programs because it’s well within the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights’ refund threshold, meaning it’s excess money that won’t touch the state budget. They alleged that the law is intended to mislead, calling it a “poison pill.”
“Politicians at the Capitol have unconstitutionally stacked the deck against citizen-driven ballot initiatives that reduce taxes,” Michael Fields, the president of Advance Colorado, said in a statement, “and Advance Colorado is suing to ensure that ballot initiatives generated by citizens are described accurately on the ballot and not subject to compelled speech or government-enforced lies.”
Supporters of the law have cast it as an attempt to make clear to voters the impact of tax cuts. Scott Wasserman, of the progressive Bell Policy Center, said Tuesday that the law is “about transparency and has always been discussed that way.”
“We had seen a number of measures that were proposing tax cuts but were not making it at all clear what was at stake,” he said. His group supported the law when it was being considered by legislators in 2021. “We felt — the legislature felt — that there was additional language that was required in the title to offer people information.”
He said tax cuts have could have “myriad impacts” in future years, should a recession hit the state and there’s no TABOR surplus. In the case, Wasserman said, tax cuts approved by voters now would translate directly into state budget reductions when the economy is in trouble.
A Polis spokesman declined to comment on pending litigation Tuesday morning. A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the office was reviewing the lawsuit but that it, generally, felt “it is important that Colorado voters have information to adequately consider the impact of tax cuts.”
Advance Colorado filed the lawsuit alongside former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown; three county commissioners from across the state; and a ballot initiative proponent from Arapahoe County. They’re asking a federal judge to rule that the law violates the First Amendment and to require Griswold to reconvene the state body that regulates ballot measures to strip the language from Advance’s two proposals.
When it was passed, the law had the support of education groups like the Colorado Education Association, plus organizations like the Bell Policy Center. When Polis signed the bill into law in 2021, he said in a statement that he wanted to “ensure that voters know what they are voting on — that the ballot language is a fair and accurate description of any proposed ballot measure.” He said he thought the impact of tax changes — on people and on the government — “should be included in the ballot title for any tax policy proposal.”
Still, the governor wrote that he was “wary of the legislature encroaching too far into the (ballot) initiative process.”
The lawsuit is the latest in a spree of recent political litigation in Colorado. Advance Colorado sued the state legislature and its Democratic leaders in July, accusing them of violating transparency laws via the use of a private voting system to weigh fiscal priorities. The Colorado Republican Party last week sued Griswold in a bid to close the party’s primaries. Before that, two House Democrats filed a lawsuit against the House, its leaders and its Republican and Democratic caucuses, alleging they were flouting open-meeting requirements.
Wasserman, of the Bell Policy Center, suggested that more litigation may follow. He said his group is weighing its own lawsuit around how ballot measures are presented to voters. That suit, should it come, would challenge a requirement that any proposed tax increases — even those that affect only a small group of Coloradans, like high-income earners or tobacco users — be written in a way that, Wasserman said, suggests that taxes will go up for everyone. Those arguments may come up in Advance Colorado’s current suit, too, he said.
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