This story by Chase Woodruff appeared on Colorado Newsline on April 22, 2024. We are sharing it in two parts.
A major set of election reforms, constitutional protections for abortion rights and a series of tit-for-tat battles over property taxes and environmental regulation top the long list of measures that may appear on Colorado ballots in November.
“There’s going to be about 47 ballot measures on a really long ballot,” joked Theresa Conley, chair of the state’s Initiative Title Setting Review Board, last week during the panel’s final biweekly meeting to hear proposed initiatives.
If that ends up being an overstatement, it might not be by much. For now, more than 50 different initiatives remain in play for the November ballot, though major hurdles remain for most of them, and history suggests a significant number will be withdrawn.
The first step in qualifying for the ballot is to win approval from the Title Board, a three-member panel of officials designated by the secretary of state, attorney general and the legislative branch. A majority of the board must determine that an initiative meets a constitutional requirement that measures address only a single subject, and can be given a clear “title” — a one-sentence description of the proposal that will appear on signature petitions and ballots.
Once a title is set, statutory initiatives must earn signatures from at least 124,238 registered voters, and then need a simple majority to pass. Those seeking to amend the state Constitution face two additional hurdles: they must collect signatures from at least 2% of registered voters in each of Colorado’s 35 state Senate districts, and the measure must be approved by at least 55% of voters.
Over 100 measures have been given the nod from the Title Board during the 2024 election cycle, though many of them were variations on the same proposal and dozens have already been withdrawn or expired. And at least one high-profile initiative campaign has already failed to collect enough signatures: Backers of the Colorado Life Initiative, an anti-abortion measure that would have defined life as beginning at conception, told CBS News last week that they were only able to collect “tens of thousands” of signatures.
The deadline to file a proposed initiative was April 5. Following the Title Board’s last regular hearing of the election cycle last week, another handful of measures may be approved by the board in a special re-hearing this week, or by the Colorado Supreme Court, which often has the final say on ballot title decisions. Initiatives approved for signature-gathering must submit their petitions for certification no later than Aug. 5.
Election overhaul
Some of the most fundamental changes proposed by 2024’s bumper crop of ballot measures are those contained in an election overhaul package backed by centrist megadonor Kent Thiry, former CEO of Denver-based DaVita.
The reforms would abolish Colorado’s current party primary and assembly system for federal and state offices, replacing it with an all-candidate or “jungle” primary election. The four candidates who receive the most primary votes would advance to the general election, which would be decided by ranked-choice voting, also known as instant-runoff voting. Under this method, voters would rank as many or as few of the four candidates as they wish, and candidates with the fewest first-place votes are eliminated until one candidate receives a majority.
Thiry’s Unite America group — which says it “invests in nonpartisan election reform to foster a more representative and functional government” — successfully persuaded Alaska voters to adopt the system in 2020, and it was used for the first time there in the 2022 midterms. It was widely credited with former Gov. Sarah Palin’s loss to Democrat Mary Peltola in the race for Alaska’s U.S. House seat, as well as with Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s defeat of a more conservative challenger.
The system’s perceived impact in Alaska has made ranked choice voting the target of furious criticism from right-wing Republicans, who decry it as an effort to “rig” elections. Others, including some prominent Colorado Democrats, argue the proposed system would privilege wealthy independent candidates — including Thiry himself, a former Republican who mulled a run for governor in 2018.
Thiry’s group is represented by attorneys from Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the powerful Denver-based lobbying giant, and operatives from 76 Group, a consulting firm with a long list of Republican and corporate clients. The group has filed dozens of versions of their proposal with the Title Board over the last several months, varying in minute details such as whether it would include a requirement for “timely reporting” of results on election night, or apply ranked choice voting to the presidential general election.
After reversing itself on the issue several times, the Title Board has in at least one instance approved a comprehensive version of Thiry’s election overhaul, combining the all-candidate primary and ranked choice voting in the general election in one ballot measure. Opponents have repeatedly filed objections arguing that such a measure violates the single-subject rule and accused Thiry’s group of “logrolling,” or lumping together multiple policies that wouldn’t win approval from voters on their own.
The effort has also spawned a series of countermeasures by two Republican activists. One would put a constitutional prohibition on the use of ranked choice voting by any state or local government in Colorado, mirroring laws recently enacted in a number of GOP-run states. The others aim to enact a constitutional right of candidates to gain access to the ballot “through a partisan political party caucus and assembly process” or “through the endorsement of a political party.”
Abortion rights
Backed by Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom, a coalition of groups including Cobalt and the ACLU of Colorado, Proposed Initiative 89 would recognize the right to an abortion under the Colorado Constitution. It would also allow the procedure to be covered by health insurance plans for state and local government employees, repealing a 40-year old constitutional ban that currently prohibits state dollars from being used to pay for abortions.
Organizers announced last week that they had submitted over 230,000 signatures in support of the measure to the Colorado secretary of state’s office, which will determine the sufficiency of the petitions by May 17. As a constitutional amendment, which can’t be repealed by a vote of the Legislature, the measure would need to be approved by 55% of voters to pass.
Property taxes
Conservative groups are pushing to enact a 4% annual cap on the growth of property tax revenues, unless voters authorize their local taxing district to retain the excess revenue. Several different versions of the measure are pending.
In February, Colorado Concern, an influential business group governed by a board of Colorado-based corporate executives and wealthy Republican donors, said it would join the conservative nonprofit Advance Colorado in backing the 4% cap.
An initial set of measures filed by the two groups proposed slight variations on a mechanism that would require the state to reimburse local districts using the state’s general fund, at a cost of around $750 million annually. Dave Davia, Colorado Concern’s CEO, said in a press release that the mechanism was “balanced and thoughtful” and “very intentionally protected funding increases for teachers, firefighters and other local districts.”
But after the Title Board ruled that the measure’s funding backfill violated the single-subject rule, Davia and Advance Colorado’s Michael Fields last week filed a version of their measure without any such mechanism. Separately, Davia and Fields have introduced a measure reducing property tax assessment rates, which a nonpartisan state analysis estimates would reduce funding for local districts by over $3.1 billion annually by 2026. Both have been approved by the Title Board.
At 0.55%, Colorado’s effective property tax rates are the third-lowest of any state in the nation, according to data from the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation.
A series of measures seeking to counteract the impacts of these anti-tax initiatives are also pending. All are backed by Scott Wasserman, the outgoing president of the liberal Bell Policy Center, and have won initial approval from the Title Board.
One would allow the state to transfer its own excess tax revenue — the amount usually refunded to voters under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights — to local taxing districts to offset any decreases in property tax revenue caused by the 4% cap. Another would require a vote approving the 4% cap in each local taxing district before it went into effect in that district; a third would automatically adjust property tax assessment rates upward in the event of school funding shortfalls; and a fourth would enact a new luxury property tax on homes valued at over $2 million, at the rate necessary to offset any decrease in funding from the cap.
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