Opinion: ‘Re-forming’ Boulder’s elections

 In 1999, a group of citizens placed on the ballot and voters passed what might have been the most important reform of Boulder’s election laws ever. It limited donations to candidates’ “official candidate committees” to $100 per person. Donations to “unofficial candidate committees” (candidate advocacy groups other than the candidates’ OCCs) are also limited to $100 per person.  And coordination between these UCCs and the candidate’s OCCs is strictly forbidden other than cost sharing for advertising space.

The initiative petition process has also been reformed. In 2018, the council-appointed election working group proposed, and voters approved, charter reforms that tied the number of signatures required for initiated ordinances to the actual number of voters rather than to the highly variable number of registered voters, limited council amendments after passage to those consistent with the “basic intent” of the measure, and gave the council power to implement on-line petitioning.

But more work is needed on all fronts. On the candidate side, our Council elections have now become contests between “slates,” with one group of candidates placed in opposition to another group, irrespective of whether this is an appropriate distinction or not. And that divisiveness is reinforced by combined advertising, such as folders put out by an “umbrella” group, sometimes using candidates’ photos that are the same as the ones on their candidates’ own inserts, and endorsed by a number of “member” groups. This certainly looks more like “coordination,” which is forbidden by Boulder’s election laws, than cost sharing, which is allowed.

Clearly, our laws need some work if we are to avoid ending up with political party-based councils that stifle the open exchange of ideas necessary for developing creative solutions that maximize value while minimizing conflicts. It’s time to push back against these slate-based elections, and strongly limit the ability of candidates and groups to coordinate, other than activities such as door-to-door literature drops, which from my experience of doing this many times, allows people with multiple perspectives to work together. There’s no need for candidates to even minimally coordinate their material; the past practice of combining a huge variety of campaign literature worked fine for years.

On the initiative side, the council must insist that the city manager and city attorney to do complete and detailed analyses of the language of proposed charter amendments and initiated ordinances during the mandatory 10-day review to ensure that their ballot language is clear, consistent, and fits within the existing legal structures. Unfortunately, the last few years’ work has been superficial and inadequate. For example, the original Direct Election of Mayor charter amendment petition language was very poorly written, as I have pointed out before, including miscalculating the number of council members and misaligning their terms. The Council finally had to negotiate what was, in effect, an almost completely new measure before they put it on the ballot. And the issues around using ranked choice voting were never explored.

BTW, using RCV for Council elections will create problems, just as it will for the mayoral election. As I have pointed out before, RCV has a fundamental flaw that can easily lead to dropping a candidate who would have won a head to head race with any of the other candidates. Also, imagine having to rank order 25 council candidates (as we had one year) on a 25×25 grid for a council election. And if the number of candidates voters are allowed to rank is limited, then we could have something similar to what happened in the recent New York City primary, where the process ended up selecting the candidate who likely would have come in second if complete ranking had been allowed.

The Bedroom’s ballot measure was another example of a failure to properly review the initiative’s language. Simply put, the ballot title was completely different from the legal language. The measure actually would have amended a portion of the Boulder Revised Code that sets upper limits on the number of occupants. So it would not have automatically allowed increased occupancy, as its title implied. And given the Charter’s limit on after-the-fact amendments to those that match the “basic intent,” the Council would have been in legal hot water if, after the election, it tried to align the legal language with the title, because the title and content conflicted.

Once again, we need the new Council to appoint a commission to revise our laws to promote election of the most qualified individuals, not slates, and to fix our citizen petition processes.

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