 Now there's a headline you always knew was coming. The Colorado Springs Gazette's Eileen Welsome has been covering the emergent story of three state ballot initiatives--Amendments 60, 61 and Proposition 101--for which a large and costly petition campaign was obviously mounted, but no expenses were ever reported. Efforts to get to the bottom of this have been obstructed at every step, until, as Welsome reports today:
Colorado Springs resident Douglas Bruce was a guiding force behind a massive signature-gathering campaign that led to placement on the November ballot of three controversial measures, testimony in a campaign finance complaint hearing revealed Monday.
Bruce, who has a law degree, not only advised the sponsors of the ballot issues on how to file court motions, but he also advised one proponent not to testify at the hearing and to destroy his e-mail, testimony and records submitted during the hearing indicate.
The surprise witness at the hearing was Michelle Northrup, a 38-year-old writer from Black Hawk. Northrup testified that she didn't approve of the evasion tactics being used by the other backers of the ballot issues and didn't "approve of orders being barked at me" by Bruce.
Northrup and Golden resident Russell Haas are sponsors of Amendment 61, which restricts borrowing by state and local governments without voter approval...
Bruce, the author of the 1992 Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, has sought to distance himself from the three measures.
But testimony by Northrup and other proponents reveal that he gave detailed advice to the sponsors not only about the language of the ballot measures, but other intricate processes associated with getting approved for the ballot by the Secretary of State's Office and the signature-gathering campaign.
Bruce was subpoenaed as a witness in the hearing. But he has refused to comply and has been evading attempts by process servers and sheriff's deputies to serve him with a court order that would compel compliance...
It's been separately reported that a number of the paid petition gatherers who allegedly worked on these initiatives lived at rental properties owned by Bruce while they gathered signatures. It's looking increasingly like Bruce is, as many suspected, the mastermind behind the whole effort to get these three budget-busting initiatives on the ballot. And in addition to coloring them with his special brand of prickly charm, he appears to have just as much open contempt for the law today as ever. None of which would have been easy to prove, though, without somebody on the inside of Bruce's scheme--in this case a sponsor of one of the initiatives--coming clean.
But now that the game is basically up, the next step gets kind of muddy. Do the alleged illegalities surrounding this case have sufficient penalty to matter? Under what circumstances could the initiatives be kept off the ballot if the process used to get them there was hopelessly abused? Is this a situation where Bruce, who nobody thinks is stupid, might have weighed the penalty for noncompliance against the benefits, and decided it was a risk worth taking?
We're also curious to see if this could be a big enough scandal for other, non-election laws to apply, such as contempt of court, RICO, or even a common law 'comic-book villain' provision (if there's not one there ought to be). As we've said before, operating a statewide petition gathering campaign, then willfully disregarding all applicable laws for disclosing the funding for those efforts, is quite serious--if Bruce and cohorts get away with this, it's basically a signal to every other scofflaw ideologue in America that Colorado election law is unenforceably weak. |
