'Missing Kyle Clark's Just Gonna Have to Use Actual Facts'
The hearing room had seen plenty of ambitious ballot initiatives. But when Legislative Council staff finished listing the eleven stated purposes of proposed Initiative #414 — including granting legal immunity to citizens who use "reasonable force" to stop suspected election crimes and restricting news organizations from reporting election tallies — proponent Hassan didn't blink.
Asked whether restricting the press on election results might constitute an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, Hassan was blunt: "Missing Kyle Clark's just gonna have to use actual facts in the media."
It was that kind of week at the Colorado Capitol. From April 3 through April 9, lawmakers and Legislative Council staff processed more than 80 committee votes, killed at least two bills outright, and sat through a marathon Thursday of review and comment hearings that touched on corporate political spending, congressional redistricting, casino expansion, and the most far-reaching election overhaul anyone had proposed in recent memory.
The Election Overhaul That Would Rewrite the Rules of Democracy
Initiative #414 — which its proponents call the Colorado Election Protection Integrity Act, or SEPA — would do away with universal mail-in voting, ban electronic voting machines and require their destruction within 90 days, mandate manual paper-ballot counting, require government-issued ID for both voting and registration, and create a new crime called "treasonous election engineering."
Legislative Council staff attorney Dan Graby and Pierce Lively of the Office of Legislative Legal Services raised more than 25 concerns, flagging apparent conflicts with the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. They also identified duplicate section numbers, a potential unconstitutional prior restraint on the press, and a 22-day canvass deadline that might be physically impossible to meet if every ballot must be counted by hand.
Hassan's response to the federal law conflicts was direct: "This government undermines federal law all the time," pointing to sanctuary policies as an example and saying courts would have to sort out any contradictions. On the manual counting deadline, co-proponent Missy Espinosa estimated "about 10 seconds per ballot to be certified" and suggested the clock starts ticking before election day: "I don't know why they wouldn't be able to tally those while the, before election day is occurring."
Staff pressed on whether the initiative would prohibit local governments, school districts, and special districts from holding mail-ballot elections — a common practice in Colorado. Hassan confirmed it would, saying home rule municipalities "wouldn't be allowed to use mail in ballot elections." The proponents stated their intent to submit to the Title Board on April 3, 2026, the deadline for the initiative to appear on the fall 2026 ballot.
If this initiative reaches the ballot and passes, it would fundamentally transform how Colorado runs elections — eliminating the mail-ballot system that the vast majority of Coloradans currently use to cast their votes.
Six Ways to Ask the Same Question About Voter ID
If one election initiative wasn't enough, the same day brought a six-pack of proposed constitutional amendments — Initiatives 362 through 367 — all addressing mail ballot voter identification requirements, some also requiring photo ID for in-person voting.
The initiatives vary in their details but share a core demand: require voters signing their mail ballot return envelope to provide either the last four digits of their Social Security number, their driver's license number, or — in some versions — their full date of birth alongside their signature. Initiatives 365, 366, and 367 go further, requiring photo identification for in-person voters from a specific list of acceptable documents.
Legislative Council staff flagged a notable tension in Initiative 365: the word "include" preceding the list of acceptable photo IDs signals, as a matter of drafting convention, that the list is not exhaustive. Staff suggested changing it to "only include." Proponents pushed back, saying they want the list to be exhaustive now but don't want to freeze out future technologies — "hypothetical biometric identification" was cited as an example.
A sharper controversy: Initiatives 365, 366, and 367 would accept a "Colorado real identification driver's license" but not a standard Colorado driver's license for voters who opted out of federal Real ID compliance. Staff asked if that exclusion was intentional. Proponents confirmed it was — but said those voters could still vote in person using a different acceptable ID.
Staff also caught a logical hole: proponents had drafted a statutory amendment to the definition of student identification cards, even though student IDs cannot be used to vote under any of the proposed constitutional provisions. Proponents conceded the point and committed to fixing it.
All six initiatives remain in the drafting stage. None has been submitted to the Title Board yet, and proponents left the hearing with a long list of revisions to make before any of them are ready for voters.
The Corporate Speech Showdown: Citizens United, Colorado-Style
Proponents Sherry Stee and Seneca Singh came to their April 3 hearing with a constitutional theory that has been bouncing around legal circles since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling: what if a state simply decided not to grant corporations the legal power to spend money on elections in the first place?
Initiative #413 would add a new section to Article 15 of the Colorado Constitution declaring that the state extends to corporations and other "artificial persons" only those powers the state explicitly grants — and that political spending power is not one of them. Any corporation that spends money to influence a Colorado election would automatically forfeit all its state-conferred "charter privileges" until it pays back the full amount of the unauthorized expenditure and gets reinstated.
The proponents drew a sharp line between their theory and Citizens United: "Citizens United was about regulatory authority. Whether the government can restrict the political speech of a corporation that already possesses the legal power to spend — that is a different question entirely from the one this initiative addresses. This initiative is about power granting authority. No court has ever held that the First Amendment requires a state to include political spending power in that package."
Staff pushed on several pressure points: Who decides an action was ultra vires — a court, or the Secretary of State automatically? What happens to a company's ability to own property or sue in court if its charter privileges are withdrawn? And what if the legislature simply never gets around to enacting reinstatement procedures?
On the transparency rationale, the proponents offered this: "One of the great benefits of this is that voters will know exactly who and what is contributing the money. And that's important. No matter whether you agree with what that nonprofit does or not, you still want to know whose money is influencing things."
Redistricting Before the Census: A Bold and Incomplete Plan
Also on the docket Thursday were Initiatives #327 and #328, a pair of companion proposals that would pre-draw Colorado's eight congressional districts — locking in boundaries for the 2028 and 2030 elections before the 2030 census even happens. Starting in 2031, the existing Congressional Redistricting Commission would take over again.
Legislative Council staff attorney Jessica Shipley identified several significant gaps in the drafting. Most notably, she asked what deadline applies for court review of the maps. The proponent's answer: "We don't have a date in there and we'll leave that to the courts."
Shipley also identified that Initiative #328 contains cross-references to statutory sections 2.1.105.2 through 2.1.105.7 — sections that don't exist in Colorado law and aren't proposed to be created by the initiative. The proponent said those references connect to "another initiative in the package" and committed to double-checking.
On whether the redistricting criteria used by the existing commission would legally apply to the temporary maps, the proponent offered a distinction that may matter in court: "As a practical matter, they may. As a legal requirement, they do not."
Casino Night, Every Night: Four Initiatives, Dozens of Problems
Four more initiatives — #415, #416, #417, and #418 — would let any town, city, county, or city and county in Colorado legalize limited casino gaming within its borders, subject to a local voter vote. Currently, Colorado limited gaming is restricted to Black Hawk, Central City, and Cripple Creek under a 1990 constitutional amendment.
The ambition was clear. The drafting was not. Legislative Council staff raised a cascade of technical and substantive problems across all four measures: internal conflicts between provisions, references to a "Local Limited Gaming Fund" that no provision actually creates, formatting violations (the Colorado Constitution doesn't allow the level of sub-sub-provision numbering the proponents used), erroneous cross-references, and direct conflicts with existing constitutional gaming provisions.
The sharpest conflict: Initiative #415 simultaneously purports to legalize gaming statewide in subsection 8A while requiring a community to pass a prerequisite ballot initiative in subsection 8C1 before it can allow gaming. As staff's Richard Sweetman put it: "Subsection 8A of the proposed initiative 415 conflicts with subsection 8C1 of the proposed initiative because section 8A purports to legalize limited gaming statewide, and subsection 8C1 describes a prerequisite — in other words, a ballot initiative that a community must satisfy before it may permit limited gaming within its boundaries."
On the "so long as" language in Initiative 415 — which implies a jurisdiction could later lose its gaming authority but provides no mechanism for that to happen — staff explained the problem and proponent Mr. Harry gave perhaps the week's most concise response: "I think we're going to take that out."
The Week in Votes: Committees Grinding Through the Calendar
Beyond the ballot initiative hearings, Colorado's Senate committees were in full session, working through a backlog of House bills crossing the chamber midway through the legislative session.
The week's most divided Senate committee vote came Thursday, when the Senate Transportation and Energy Committee advanced HB26-1113 on a 3-2 split, with Sens. Rod Pelton and Lynda Zamora Wilson voting no. The bill heads next to Senate Appropriations.
One bill died quietly: SB26-127 was postponed indefinitely by a 4-0 committee vote, with Sen. Marc Catlin absent. The Senate Business, Labor, and Technology Committee also voted 4-3 to advance HB26-1045 over the objections of Sens. Mark Baisley, Janice Rich, and Lynda Zamora Wilson.
On the House side, a Judiciary committee vote on HB26-1334 ended with the bill being postponed indefinitely on a 7-6 vote — using the relatively rare "reversal of the previous roll call" procedure. HB26-1148 was also killed on an 8-3 vote.
The most unusual House split of the week came on HB26-1411, which passed a committee 7-3 — with Reps. Junie Joseph, Yara Zokaie, and Elizabeth Velasco voting no alongside at least some of the committee's Republicans. Cross-party opposition on a single bill in a Democratic-majority committee is notable, though the hearing data does not include testimony explaining the objections.
Some committee action was nearly unanimous: SB26-113 passed in a House committee on an 8-5 vote, heading to the Finance Committee, while HB26-1306 advanced 6-5 to Appropriations — the tightest margin of any non-killing vote recorded this week.
What to Watch Next Week
The Title Board clock is ticking. Proponents of Initiative #414 stated their intent to submit to the Title Board on April 3 — the deadline for the fall 2026 ballot. Watch for whether the Title Board accepts the submission and whether staff's extensive list of unresolved legal conflicts becomes a formal objection at that hearing.
Voter ID initiative package. Proponents of Initiatives 362–367 left Thursday's hearing with a substantial revision list: changing "full date of birth" to "year of birth," fixing the student ID statutory amendment, clarifying which elections the measures cover, and resolving the question of whether the acceptable ID list is exhaustive. Watch for revised drafts and a possible Title Board submission.
SB26-006 heads to Appropriations after passing committee 6-1 on Wednesday, with Sen. Kyle Mullica as the sole dissenter. The bill's fiscal note will determine whether it survives to a Senate floor vote.
HB26-1045 — which passed the Senate Business committee 4-3 — now advances to the full Senate. A floor debate is likely, and the three-vote margin means any defection could matter.
HB26-1306 cleared its House committee by just one vote, 6-5. Watch for whether the Appropriations Committee tightens or kills the measure before it can reach the full House.