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Initiatives to open primaries, bring ranked choice voting challenged in Colorado Supreme Court
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Initiatives to open primaries, bring ranked choice voting challenged in Colorado Supreme Court

By Sherrie Peif | Complete Colorado DENVER — While two ballot initiatives dealing with Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) are already either gathering signatures or in the petition approval phase with the secretary of state, two more citizen-initiated measures that would completely upend Colorado elections are going through an appeals process with the Colorado Supreme Court. Ballot initiatives 188 and 310 “Concerning the Conduct of Elections,” would drastically change the way primary elections are held in Colorado. Only one of the two initiatives would actually go to voters, as they are near mirror images of each other, but either one would make Colorado’s primaries fully open and mandate use of RCV to conduct the elections. According to the final app...
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Gaines: Imagine if journalists covered guns like they do abortion
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Gaines: Imagine if journalists covered guns like they do abortion

By Cory Gaines | Complete Colorado I think you can take Democrat House Majority Leader Duran at her word when she recently told CPR News, that she and her colleagues made passing gun control legislation “…routine, just as anything else that we run.”  Since taking over all levers of power at the state level, and suffering no negative consequences, majority Democrats have indeed made gun control legislation “routine” in Colorado. In that same CPR article, Duran is also quoted as saying, “I know the bills we passed this year will make a big difference in making our community safer.”  Regardless of where you put the balance point between individual liberties and tradeoffs made in the name of safety, I hope that we could agree that we should be careful putting restrictions on any kin...
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Caldara: Looming gas price hike entirely Jared Polis’ doing
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Caldara: Looming gas price hike entirely Jared Polis’ doing

By Jon Caldara | Complete Colorado (You can listen to this column, read by the author, here). The Hayman fire in 2002 was one of the worst in Colorado’s history. What’s more appalling is it was started by one person whose responsibility it was to make sure forest fires don’t happen in the first place. That’s what is going on today with the one person who should have prevented our gasoline prices from spiking $0.50 to $1 per gallon, but instead made it happen. In that remarkably dry year of 2002, there was a burn ban in the area northwest of Colorado Springs. A park ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, Terry Barton, a forestry technician, set a piece of paper on fire in an area she knew was prone to ignite. Why? Some say it was so she could put out the fire and look like...
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Gaines: Getting back from the state what we’re owed under TABOR
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Gaines: Getting back from the state what we’re owed under TABOR

By Cory Gaines | Complete Colorado (via Colorado Accountability Project) Pretend that your employer accidentally overpaid you, say $20 extra a month for a couple years.  Neither of you notice until one day you get an email telling you about the mistake.  The mistake has been fixed and your pay will be $20 less going forward.  Also, you now owe your employer $240.  Not a pleasant thing to consider. Fresh on the heels of Governor Polis signing the state budget, we got similar bad news.  Due to an accounting error there’s a $67 million “oops” in the budget. The mistake stretches all the way back to the hurried 2020 legislative session and a bill rushed through for Polis’ signature.  SB20-215 created the Health Insurance Affordability Enter...
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Numerous citizen-led initiatives working for a spot on Colorado’s November ballot
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Numerous citizen-led initiatives working for a spot on Colorado’s November ballot

By Sherrie Peif | Complete Colorado  Colorado is one of just 21 states that allow citizens’ ballot initiatives to change state statute or amend the state Constitution, and one of just 14 states that allow for direct initiatives, meaning the state’s legislature does not have to confirm the statute. Nearly every election year there are a handful of measures for voters to decide, while other efforts never make it to the ballot. This year is no exception, with a huge number of initiatives at various stages of the process, including many being challenged to the Colorado Supreme Court. There are measures to guarantee abortion rights in the state’s Constitution (while another, that did not gather enough signatures would have banned abortion entirely). Other measures would reduce property...
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Sharf: No, left-tilting media, campus protestors aren’t anti-war, just anti-Jew
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Sharf: No, left-tilting media, campus protestors aren’t anti-war, just anti-Jew

By Joshua Sharf | Complete Colorado The digital news site Denverite (owned by Colorado Public Radio), as well as other leftward-tilting Colorado news outlets, recently referred to the inhabitants of a pro-Hamas tent encampment on the Auraria Campus in Denver as “anti-war.” Editorial note: They’re not anti-war, they’re just anti-Jew. As the campus protests grow more violent they are also exposed as being more radical than one might suppose from coverage by standard left-of-center news outlets.  It is not uncommon for them to openly support Hamas’s October 7 indiscriminate massacre and rapes as “legitimate acts of resistance,” even as they deny that the worst of the atrocities even happened.  They cite Hamas’s unverifiable, and likely invented,  casualty figures witho...
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Caldara: Colorado’s majority Democrats assault free speech
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Caldara: Colorado’s majority Democrats assault free speech

By Jon Caldara | Complete Colorado (You can listen to this column, read by the author, here.) Among all protections throughout human existence for political minorities, none greater was ever created before the First Amendment. For the better part of my life, it was classic liberals and the political left who fought for the right of dissent, guaranteeing government shall not abridge speech. It was the cultural warriors of my childhood through school, media and Hollywood who drilled into us themes like: “innocent until proven guilty”; “the ends don’t justify the means”; “I disagree with what you say, but defend your right to say it”; and “dissent is patriotic.” Why? Because the political majority needs no protection for its self-expression. The political minority does. ...
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Caldara: Ex-Rep. Ken Buck leaves constituents without a voice in D.C., at worst possible time
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Caldara: Ex-Rep. Ken Buck leaves constituents without a voice in D.C., at worst possible time

By Jon Caldara | Complete Colorado (You can listen to this column, read by the author, here.) The speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, has called for a vote on funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. He has done so at sizable professional risk. His isolationist Republicans might remove him from his leadership position for it. By the time you read this column, you’ll likely know how those votes went. As I write this, I have no idea. But I do know there’s one vote that could be wildly important, if only there were a representative to cast it. With Ken Buck’s resignation well before his term ends, he has left the voters of Colorado’s 4th Congressional District without a voice in government, and at a remarkably critical time. Not only is the ...
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Voters may get to decide on cost-saving shortening of Colorado legislative session
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Voters may get to decide on cost-saving shortening of Colorado legislative session

By Sherrie Peif | Complete Colorado DENVER — Independence Institute President Jon Caldara has become well known for his willingness to take issues directly to the voters, and one topic has catapulted to the top of his “must do” list. Caldara is hoping to take what is currently known as Initiative 183 to the 2024 ballot, asking voters to reduce the annual Colorado legislative session from its current 120 days down to just 90 days. The initiative is now in the petition approval phase, after which Caldara will need to collect 124,238 valid signatures of registered voters (5 percent of the total votes cast for secretary of state in 2022). Additionally, because the initiative amends the Colorado Constitution he will need to collect at least 2 percent of that number from insid...
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Orr, Rolling: Xcel power blackout showcases the high cost of unreliable electricity
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Orr, Rolling: Xcel power blackout showcases the high cost of unreliable electricity

 By Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling | Complete Colorado Hundreds of thousands of Xcel Energy customers in Colorado recenlty lost power as high winds damaged power lines, and Xcel preemptively shut off the power to 55,000 customers to mitigate the risk of wildfires. Among the customers who lost power were homeowners and small businesses who received little to no warning. The Denver Post detailed how families experienced entire refrigerators and freezers full of food spoiling, forcing them to refill them at a time when food costs are 25 percent higher than they were four years ago. Business owners without power lost tens of thousands of dollars due to the outages, which stemmed from lost revenue from being unable to do business and lost products. Restaurant...
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