Opinion: Clarifying the ‘Three Term Limit’ petition controversy


Given the controversy around the protest filed over the “Three Term Limit” petition, I thought Camera readers might find it useful to have a brief analysis of the charter amendment process for home rule cities like Boulder.
The Boulder City Charter, Section 137, references the Colorado Constitution as the authority on charter amendments. The Constitution (Article XX, Section 9) provides the basics, and empowers the Legislature to set the procedures. These are in the Colorado Revised Statutes (mostly in CRS31-2-201 through 31-2-225). For citizen-initiated charter amendments, the CRS are very specific as to the form of the petitions (the documents that voters sign), including size (8.5″ x 11″), orientation (portrait, not landscape), and that the warning (requiring signers to be registered voters, etc.) must be printed in red on every page. Disassembly, such as removal of staples, is not allowed, to help prevent fraud.
CRS 31-2-219 specifies, “Any such petition which fails to conform to the requirements of this part 2 or is circulated in a manner other than that permitted in this part 2 is invalid.” And CRS 31-2-221 states, “Any disassembly of the petition which has the effect of separating the affidavits from the signatures shall render the petition invalid and of no force and effect.”
I checked with a few other Front Range cities to see how they handled charter amendment petitions. They are careful in educating citizens how to conform to the legal requirements and checking their documents, so they don’t run into the type of problems that are happening here. But they also would find such a petition invalid if, for example, it lacked the red warning on every page, or was disassembled. So, either way, the current protest should never have become necessary.
Generally, for petitions circulated solely by volunteers who try to ensure that only resident registered voters sign, the percentage of signatures found invalid is on the order of 15 percent. But for the “Three Term Limit” petition, which had paid circulators, the city has already invalidated over 40 percent of them. This leaves the petition only 41 signatures (0.88 percent) above the required minimum of 4,642 registered voters.
So I looked at a petition and became curious about some signatures that seemed suspicious. I then asked the city if I could check these against the actual voter records. I discovered that the city does not actually check the signatures on the petition against the signatures on file with the county, but just checks names and addresses. (The CRS actually allow this.) The city referred me to the county, which told me that under state law they were not allowed to let me see the signatures they have on file. So although the CRS allow citizens to “protest” signatures that look fishy (and I’m not alone in having such concerns), the citizens cannot see the real signatures for comparison — so this power to protest is essentially meaningless. And the city has already found apparent fraud, like in rejecting petition #98 (available on the city website), the city noted that the information (12 signatures, names, and addresses) on “Page 5 appears to have been completed by the same person.”
There were plenty of mistakes by all involved, so I’ll focus on what to do in the future. Petitioners should know that they are 100 percent responsible for reading and following the law in every detail; it’s their petition, and no wiggle room is allowed. The city clerk’s office needs to carefully educate petitioners about the rules, and should check petitions before they are circulated to make sure that they precisely match the legal requirements. The city’s legal department itself needs to get clear up front about what the law says, make sure all parties understand it, and not get fancy with their interpretations. The petition process is the essence of direct democracy, and we don’t need after-the-fact justifications or excuses by anybody.
The signature checking process should include actual comparison of a significant sample to make sure that the signatures on the petitions are legitimate. This, plus real penalties, will help dis-incentivize fraud.
Finally, I want to thank Crystal Gray and John Spitzer for exposing these problems; without their protest, all of this would have stayed buried. Now it’s up to the City Council to act.
And speaking of the council, the CRS require that the title (the ballot text that describes the proposal) for a citizen-initiated charter amendment be set at the first council meeting after the signatures are certified, a rule ignored both last year and this.


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