Democrat lawmakers want to add more rules for Coloradans to follow to make it harder to recall elected officials.
Senate Majority Leader Steve Fenberg of Boulder calls it voter education.
We call it manipulating voters by introducing bias into the process to protect those officials under fire.
Debbie Teeter, who was part of the effort to recall the mayor of Westminster over water rates, told Channel 7 the process is already complicated enough.
She questioned why lawmakers are so afraid they want to make a tough process even harder.
It’s a legitimate question.
Under Fenberg’s bill, petitioners would be prohibited from making false statements on the petition, although it’s unclear who the fact checker would be. Facebook, perhaps?
That’s clearly an intimidation tactic to prevent petitioners from saying anything negative about the person they think should be kicked from office for wrong doing.
Adding insult to injury, they would have to pay to add a statement to the petition from the person they want to recall.
So if Citizens against Perverts wants to recall an elected official who was arrested for perving against children, the petitioners might not be able to add “child pervert” to the petition, and instead they have to print the perverts claim that he’s only guilty of loving little children.
That’s an extreme example, but it makes the point Democrats are trying to introduce bias into the system to protect incumbents from recall.
They also want petition gatherers to wear labels indicating whether they are volunteers, or getting paid to collect signatures.
Again, more bias.
And, the petitioner has to hire someone to conduct a cost benefit analysis and again pay more money for petitions to tell potential signers that elections cost a lot of money.
The purpose again being to dissuade signers.
There’s more rules and regulations in the bill to protect elected officials, but if they really wanted job protection and to stem the number of recalls, maybe they should try being more accountable and transparent to voters.