September 24, 2010 12:53 AM UTC

Reminder: Flouting Colorado Election Law is Easy and Fun

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• by: Colorado Pols

One of the key themes in the long battle to uncover the backers behind Amendments 61, 61 and Proposition 101 has been the yawning inadequacy of Colorado election law to deter willful violators. It’s simple arithmetic: these initiatives made the ballot on the strength of tens of thousands of signatures–none of the necessary financial backing for that effort has been disclosed, despite daily fines and no small amount of negative press.

And why, you ask?

Because the penalty is so small that backers have less to lose by violation than they do by compliance–not in overhead costs of compliance, of course, but to their reputations as the full devastating effect of these initiatives becomes widely understood by the public.

And as the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports, they’ve started a trend.

Sponsors of a ballot measure on bail bonds have never filed a campaign-finance report despite a large-scale petition drive to put Proposition 102 on the ballot…

The issue exposes the inability of Colorado’s election laws to make sure Colorado voters know who is for and against the issues they will see on the November ballot. It is the second time this election that a group has managed to place questions before voters without revealing who paid for the campaign.

…Duran said he and Donovan paid for the petition campaign, which turned in 170,000 signatures Aug. 2. The official pro-102 campaign, Safe Streets Colorado, did not register until 24 days later, and it still has not filed a campaign-finance report to disclose its donors to the public.

…Testimony in a federal lawsuit this summer revealed that ballot campaigns typically spend $2 or more per signature to professional petition circulators. Duran and Donovan collected 170,000 signatures for Proposition 102 – about 30,000 more signatures than most successful ballot campaigns submit.

A similar case against three other ballot measures – the tax-cutting amendments 60 and 61 and Proposition 101 – is still dragging on…

Now, according to the proponents, they’re going to comply here any day now–sort of what the “Dr. Evil” intitiative crew has been saying for months. In the meantime, they can count the meager fines as a perfectly manageable cost of doing business. According to Hanel, these principal agents for Proposition 102 are all linked to similar efforts in other states, in turn linked to Bail USA–the bail bond industry giant. And just by coincidence, the bail bond industry stands pretty much exclusively to benefit from Proposition 102!

It’s not about restrictions–this is about basic accountability to the law, folks. A situation where it is advantageous to violate the law rather than comply is going to be exploited. What we’re talking about is the already-required disclosure of who is foisting these measures on Colorado voters, which is essential in understanding why they are on the ballot. Something has got to be done, legislatively, with teeth, or we’re looking at a future of perpetual unaccountable freakshow.