Face the State Staff Report
Due to the massive length of this year’s ballot, voters are now leaning on elected officials and third-party voter guides to help them navigate the election.
Ballot guides are not a new concept and the most well known is the "State Ballot Information Booklet," conversationally known as the blue book, put out by the General Assembly's legislative council prior to every statewide election. But as voters are blasted with political ads from every angle, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to keep up with all the issues. Many voters are responding by turning to more partisan sources for information.
State Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, was getting so many questions from voters about the various initiatives that she has started delivering her own perspective on the measures to constituents. “People find the blue book very hard to understand and very confusing,” she said. “There are an equal number of arguments for and against everything, but if people aren’t familiar with state government they still don’t always know how to vote.”
This year’s blue book is 65-pages long and not a quick read for voters. As part of her re-election campaign for Senate District 27, Spence attends multiple candidate forums a week, where she has made it part of her routine to give an overview of the ballot measures, including the pros and cons and, in many cases, how she plans to vote. “People are grateful for that,” she said. “A lot of them sit there and take notes.”
Spence isn’t the only lawmaker using her platform to educate voters about the 2008 initiatives. Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, sent his supporters a voter guide via email with a “yes” or “no” recommendation for each measure. Gordon, however, made no recommendation on Amendment 50, which would allow gaming communities to vote to raise their hours, stakes, and to add additional games.
The Colorado C-3 Roundtable, a coalition of liberal non-profits, has been traveling around the state hosting a series of ballot forums and handing out its own voter guide, also with “yes” and “no” recommendations. Two weeks ago, the liberal activist group ProgressNow also released a ballot guide, which was in-line with all of the C-3 Roundtable’s endorsements. Predictably, both groups oppose measure that are considered center-right such as Amendments 46, 47, 48, 49 and 54, while supporting the two measures (Amendments 51 and 58) that raise taxes and Amendment 59, which tears down the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
Meanwhile, the Arapahoe County Republican Party mailed a ballot guide that holds the exact opposite position on nearly every measure to every house in the county, coordinating the timing with mail-in ballots being sent out. The party's guide abstained, however, on a handful of more controversial measures, such as Amendment 48, which defines “personhood” as the moment of conception.
“It’s hard to take a position on everything,” said Spence. “Forty-eight, for example, is just too polarizing.”
Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, says another popular, and perhaps obvious, source of information on the ballot issues is the newspapers. While Caldara confesses the importance of newspaper endorsements is dwindling because there are so many other sources of information, he predicts this year they are making a comeback because there are so many ballot measures.
But Caldara also admits to seeing the appeal of a voter guide. “[The blue book] can be very confusing and boring to read,” he said. “I can understand why people go to the groups they support looking for answers.”
The blue book is no stranger to controversy. In 2004, when FasTracks was on the ballot, RTD was the repository of the pro and con arguments that landed in the Blue Book. RTD took the “no” statement from someone who was working on the FasTracks campaign, effectively sabotaging the argument against it. Caldara took the issue to court, and while the judge agreed that what RTD had done was reprehensible, he ruled it was out of his jurisdiction to change the language.
According to Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany, who sits on state state's Legislative Council, the council's staff puts the blue book together after soliciting public input from everyone interested in the issue. Then it comes before the members for a vote. Members of the Legislative Council can alter the language of the Blue Book, but only with the support of two-thirds of all panel members.
Amendment 46 spokeswoman Jessica Peck Corry, who is also an editorial contributor to Face The State, expressed concern about the current process associated with developing blue book language. "In most cases, unelected partisans have all the power in the decision making process here, and when no court is willing to take jurisdiction, you have a system highly subject." Ultimately, Corry says she was generally satisfied with the language describing her initiative, but that it only came after she spent dozens of hours to fight to have biased language removed. "The fiscal note was especially troubling and there appeared an unwillingness to conduct an objective analysis."
Additional information voter information is available at GoVoteColorado.com. Secretary of State spokesman Rich Coolidge said the site is non-partisan and offers information about candidates, campaign finance and the ballot initiatives. He said anyone who calls the SoS with questions about the ballot’s content is referred to that site.