A ballot measure meant to ensure that local communities don’t allow non-citizens to vote in their elections qualified for the 2020 ballot Thursday, but even if passed, it wouldn’t apply to dozens of Colorado’s largest cities.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office validated 137,362 signatures, more than the required 124,632 — 2% of voters in every state Senate district — to put Initiative 76 on the ballot, officials announced Thursday. Petitioners submitted more than 200,000 signatures.
Because it’s a constitutional amendment, it has to pass with 55% of the vote or more to take effect.
Although Colorado already requires voters to be citizens to cast ballots, as does federal law, the measure would prevent some Colorado cities from allowing undocumented immigrants to vote in local elections, as San Francisco did in its school board elections last year, for instance.
But even if the measure passes, Colorado’s more than 100 home-rule cities or towns — which have local control of their individual governments, as granted by the state constitution — won’t be subject to the same rules.
“This initiative will have absolutely no impact on home-rule municipalities and their right to determine who gets to vote in their local elections,” said Colorado Municipal League Executive Director Kevin Bommer.
Colorado’s most populous cities, including Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, are all home-rule cities, and therefore, the measure would have no bearing on how the local governments decided to run their elections.
The citizenship measure calls for amending the wording on voting in the state’s constitution from “every citizen” who is at least 18 to “only a citizen of the United States” who is at least 18 years old.
Initiative 76 representative Arvin Michel, a registered Republican who lives in Columbine Valley, hopes that the home-rule municipalities and cities will choose to follow the rest of the state, and he anticipates the ballot measure will pass in Colorado. His co-representative is George Athanasopoulos who ran to represent Colorado’s 7th Congressional District in 2016 and lost.
“Talking with people, just generally, I do find support for changing the wording we have in the constitution,” Michel said. “It should have no problem passing.”
Several Republican legislators, including Colorado House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, R-Castle Rock, are backing the effort. Banning non-citizens from voting is a nationwide movement, led by Florida nonprofit Citizen Voters Inc.
But opponents of Initiative 76 say the measure is misleading and feeding into anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“Put bluntly, Initiative 76 is a conspiracy-minded propaganda piece meant to energize an anti-immigrant base for the 2020 election,” Cristian Solano-Cordova, a spokesman for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, previously told The Denver Post.
Florida voters will decide on banning non-citizens from voting next year, as well. The Florida initiative is led by consultants, secret donors and activists with close ties to President Donald Trump, according to The Washington Post. Former Missouri state lawmaker John Loudon is the chair of Citizen Voters.
Michel, however, said he has “not encountered” the group.
“I think it was an oversight on the original wording in the (state) constitution in that it did allow all citizens to vote, but it did not prevent non-citizens from voting,” he said. “This is really to clear up that one item in the constitution to say not only who can vote but who can’t vote.”
