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Author: Jen Schumann

Initiative 195 would raise taxes on Colorado’s top earners. A new report asks whether they’d stay.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Initiative 195 would raise taxes on Colorado’s top earners. A new report asks whether they’d stay.

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice The income tax on a Colorado household earning under $25,000 would fall by $9 a year under Initiative 195. A filer reporting between $2 million and $5 million would pay about $13,914 more. Both figures come from the measure's certified ballot title. The Common Sense Institute, a free-market policy group in Greenwood Village, says that second household is also the one most likely to pack up and leave Colorado, and that the state would lose part of the revenue the tax is supposed to bring in right along with it. Initiative 195 would end Colorado's flat income tax. The state taxed income on a graduated scale for its first 50 years, then switched in 1987 to a single rate, now 4.4 percent, that applies to every earner.  In its place, 1...
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Colorado Secretary of State now prosecutes Pueblo Democrats in bingo finance case it dismissed
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Colorado Secretary of State now prosecutes Pueblo Democrats in bingo finance case it dismissed

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice The Colorado Secretary of State's office dismissed the complaint. Now, after a judge sent the case back, the state itself is the one prosecuting it. On June 15, the office's Elections Division filed its own complaint against the Pueblo County Democrat Party. The complaint alleges the Pueblo County Democrat Party failed to report contributions and expenditures tied to its affiliated Central Committee and its bingo-funded headquarters. 2026.06.15 - AHO Complaint_Pueblo County Democratic Party (1)Download The filing advances a case Pueblo resident Jonathan Ambler spent nearly two years building: that the party financed operations through an affiliated nonprofit and its bingo operation without reporting that activity in state campa...
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She circled his photo in seventh grade. For America’s 250th, she’s taking his name to Washington
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She circled his photo in seventh grade. For America’s 250th, she’s taking his name to Washington

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Days before leaving on a trip she has waited 50 years to take, Rahna Autrey walked into her garage and found a face she had promised never to forget. The tub of childhood keepsakes sat on a shelf in her garage. Inside was her seventh-grade scrapbook, Partridge Family magazines and all. Inside was the brochure that came with her bracelet. One photograph had a blue circle drawn around it. "I couldn't believe it," she said. "What a God thing, huh?" The soldier was Staff Sgt. William "Sandy" Sanderlin, lost over South Vietnam on Dec. 2, 1969. She never met him. But she wore a bracelet with his name for five years, until it broke when she was a senior in high school. Across the country in those years, Americans wore POW/MIA bracelets, each ...
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What our fathers taught us
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What our fathers taught us

Compiled by Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice We put a single question to some of the writers you read here: what's the best thing your father taught you, or the thing you didn't understand until much later?  Nobody sent us a speech. They sent us a memory. Some are about work. Some are about faith, or grit, or a sentence a man said once and never repeated. Much of what these dads handed down came through more than instruction. Your father taught you most in ways he probably didn't plan. Most of us figure that out later. Here are their words, on Father's Day. My father was part of "the greatest generation," a WWII veteran. After the war he was a traveling salesman for the Quaker Oats company for 30 years or so. He taught me the importance of being there. Whenever my d...
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Beverly Aikins on faith, recovery and the next right thing
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Beverly Aikins on faith, recovery and the next right thing

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Hillbilly Elegy made her a character in her son's book. Ten years into recovery, the nurse and grandmother is telling it herself—and bringing it to the RMV Freedom Fest on June 26. Last Christmas, everyone in Beverly Aikins' family opened a gift she had made by hand. She had not sewn in years. The machine had been quiet a long time. Somewhere in a decade of getting well, it started running again. She counts that as recovery. Not the headlines. The sewing. Most people who know Aikins know her secondhand. Her son wrote about her addiction in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. He talked about it again at the 2024 Republican convention, where the cameras found her in the crowd. This time the questions are hers to answer. Aikins...
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Lara Logan: Why ordinary people still give her hope
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Lara Logan: Why ordinary people still give her hope

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice A few weeks after walking out of a Colorado prison, Tina Peters will take the stage at RMV Freedom Fest. Lara Logan will follow her to the microphone. After decades covering wars, terrorism, government corruption and some of the biggest stories in the world, Logan still talks most about people like Peters. A county clerk. A whistleblower. A parent standing before a school board. An ordinary person who decides staying quiet is no longer an option. "People like Tina Peters ... she was just a mom," Logan said. Logan is no stranger to the state. Over the past several years, Colorado has kept showing up in her reporting through Tina Peters' case and the election-integrity disputes that followed. For Logan, Peters' story fit a patte...
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Colorado rebuilt how it votes twice. Its federal plan never caught up.
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Colorado rebuilt how it votes twice. Its federal plan never caught up.

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold has called the state's switch to mail-in voting a transformation of democracy. The federal election plan Colorado keeps on file describes an election system mostly built around precinct polling places. Both come from the state. One appeared in a 2023 news release celebrating the 10th anniversary of Colorado's vote-by-mail law.  The other appears in Colorado's official Help America Vote Act State Plan, which has not been updated since 2008 despite two major changes to how Coloradans vote and register. The issue surfaced through a HAVA complaint filed in February by Highlands Ranch resident Michael Cahoon and Wisconsin election researcher Peter Bernegger. At the May 11 hearing, they we...
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Wolf opponents ask federal officials to revisit Prop 114 after Keshel report challenges 2020 result
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Wolf opponents ask federal officials to revisit Prop 114 after Keshel report challenges 2020 result

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice The fight over Colorado wolves has landed in a federal review process. Opponents of wolf reintroduction are asking federal officials to reconsider Colorado's wolf program after submitting a report that claims Proposition 114 did not actually pass. Colorado Conservation Alliance filed the report June 5 with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during a federal review of Colorado's gray wolf program. Michael Clark, chairman of Colorado Conservation Alliance and CEO of Petrox Resources, signed the submission. The filing takes aim at a message Clark says Coloradans have heard for years. "The message has been both constant and assertive, Colorado's wolf program is 'the will of the people' because Proposition 114 passed," Clark wrote to U.S. F...
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The election analyst Newt Gingrich trusts has a word for 2020, and it isn’t “stolen”
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The election analyst Newt Gingrich trusts has a word for 2020, and it isn’t “stolen”

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Stolen is the wrong word. Seth Keshel says so himself. And Keshel is a retired Army intelligence captain who has spent nearly six years tagged in headlines as an election denier and a conspiracy theorist. Ask him the obvious question—was the 2020 election stolen—and he says no. He says something else. "I don't believe the elections are stolen. I believe that they're rigged," Keshel said. "And that's what Newt Gingrich believes too." Keshel, a former Army captain of military intelligence and Afghanistan veteran, built a second career reading election returns the way he once read a battlefield. His book, The American War on Election Corruption, reached No. 1 in three Amazon categories this spring and carries a foreword by former House ...
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Eleven Colorado lawmakers on the ballot first reached office through appointment
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Eleven Colorado lawmakers on the ballot first reached office through appointment

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Every Coloradan who feels ignored at the Capitol can take comfort in this: they have not one but two people assigned to listen. Your House member splits attention among roughly 92,500 residents. Your senator, among about 171,800. As ballots arrive across the state this week ahead of the June 30 primary election, some of those lawmakers earned their seat with less than 50 votes, and one with only 10—from a committee.  Among the names appearing on those ballots are 11 current lawmakers who were never elected to the seats they now hold. Some were selected by vacancy committees after lawmakers resigned. One was ultimately appointed by Gov. Jared Polis after a vacancy committee failed to submit paperwork before a statutory deadline. ...
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