You are innocent until a jury says otherwise, and local police should not be reporting anyone to Homeland Security on a charge. Trump’s ICE already breaks due process and deports residents who have lived in our country without a problem for decades. Amendment 81 writes ICE cooperation into the Colorado Constitution. It requires law enforcement to notify federal immigration authorities when someone they can’t confirm is “lawfully present” is charged with certain crimes, before any conviction. It overrides the limits Colorado already put on civil immigration enforcement and makes immigrants afraid to call 911. 

LITA 19 (Tim Hernandez on ICE and Initiative 95), LITA 28 (Aly Belknap on ICE at polling places).

A constitution protects people’s rights, not an industry’s product. 82 gives natural gas a constitutional guarantee and hands fossil fuel companies a new tool to sue over clean energy rules and building codes. No other industry gets this, and this one shouldn’t either.

Wildlife policy should follow science, and the constitution shouldn’t lock one method in forever. Amendment 83 makes hunting and fishing the “preferred” way to manage wildlife and protects undefined “traditional methods,” which could reopen baiting and leghold traps that Colorado voters already banned. Nobody is coming for your elk tag.

The burden belongs on the state to count your vote, not on you to prove you deserve it. Colorado’s signature-verified mail ballot system is the best in the country, and 84 adds an ID number requirement to the envelope and throws out any ballot that doesn’t match the database unless you fix it on a short clock.. The $2.2 million to put it on the ballot came from an out-of-state group that won’t say who its donors are. The same measure is on California’s ballot this year with $17 million from billionaire Richard Uihlein, and Trump spent the spring trying to stop mail ballots by executive order. The people behind 84 want fewer of us voting by mail, and they’re testing whether the state with the best mail system in the country will give it up. Hard no.

LITA 28 (Aly Belknap on election protection and Trump’s mail ballot order).

Your right to vote should include your right to understand the ballot. Amendment 85 is two sentences. Ballot questions have to be written in plain language at an eighth-grade reading level, and no state law can force wording into a citizen initiative’s title that breaks that rule. It doesn’t change what any measure does. It changes whether you can read the question.

We know who wrote it. Advance Colorado,--a conservative political organization who we are actively against, --put 85 on the ballot, and a lot of people we respect are a no for that reason. We get it. We did weeks of research before we landed here, and we’re a yes on the policy. This split comes from both of our personal experiences as children of immigrants, multilingual people and former teachers. 

Here is the part that gets repeated and isn’t true: that 85 wipes out the tax information on the ballot, like the Prop GG table showing what a tax change means at each income level. Read the amendment. Nothing in 85 repeals Prop GG or the 2021 disclosure law. The Blue Book says those laws “may lead to challenges,” which is a long way from gone. A table of numbers is about as plain as language gets. And the legislature’s own 2026 plain language law, HB26-1320, exempts the required tax language from its own readability test, which is why the title on Amendment 87 is a 194-word sentence in capital letters. 85 takes that exemption away. The tax information stays and it has to be readable.

Plain language doesn’t belong to anybody. It helps whoever has the better idea. If at worst, 85 is a jump ball, and we believe it bounces our way because progressive ideas are more inherently popular when it comes to affordability, healthcare, getting money out of politics. The people who will implement this policy if it passes are the people who write ballot titles now: the Secretary of State’s office, the Attorney General’s office, and the legislature’s lawyers, with the courts behind them. Deep clerked at the Colorado Supreme Court and knows how those fights go. Give those people a clear standard and we trust the outcome more than the status quo.

This isn’t the first time Deep has bucked the party or the left when the position looked like reflex instead of policy. He supported ranked choice voting, supported building housing on an abandoned golf course, opposed the flavored tobacco ban, and supported a sales tax for affordable housing. We disagree with friends on this one and that’s allowed! See the disclosure up top. 

Deep’s full write-up here, and our explainer in LITA 31.

Don’t disarm while the other side is drawing maps. Democrats and progressives in Texas and Florida would crawl over broken glass to vote for something like this, because their legislatures are the ones gerrymandering mid-decade. Ours already has an independent commission. Amendment 86 adds a constitutional ban on changing congressional maps between censuses and a Colorado Supreme Court veto on top. We would love to end gerrymandering in every state. The realistic way there is a Democratic majority in Congress willing to pass national reform, and that majority gets harder to win if Colorado ties its own hands while Texas and Florida redraw again before 2030. Fair maps are the goal but unilateral disarmament is not the way there.

Tax the rich! Amendment 87 strikes one line of TABOR, the single-rate mandate, and replaces the flat 4.4 percent with brackets from 3.7 to 8.4 percent. Rates only go up above $500,000, and the Blue Book’s own table shows every income group under a million dollars pays less. That’s 97 percent of Coloradans getting a cut, and about $2.7 billion a year for K-12, healthcare, and childcare in a separate fund with annual audits. Seniors’ and veterans’ pension deductions don’t change, whatever the ads say. More than 1,000 volunteers gathered 75 percent of the signatures from Creede to Moffat to Durango. It passes with a simple majority. This is the biggest yes on your ballot.

LITA 30 (Caroline Nutter, Colorado Fiscal Institute), Harsh Take #1 on the LITA Substack, LITA 3 (Chris deGruy Kennedy on TABOR).