The story of the creation of the first laser, which like much of physics lore is likely apocryphal, is that it was a solution in search of a problem.
I thought about that when I read the Democrats’ first senate bill of the legislative session, SB25-001, which creates the “Colorado Voting Rights Act.”
To quote what my county commissioner Jerry Sonnenberg said of the bill when I shared it with him, “I would love to know what problem they [the sponsors] are trying to solve.”
What’s the actual problem?
There’s not a lot a reasonable person could disagree with in the bill summary. Who would want to disenfranchise any eligible voter in this state? Who in their right mind would seek to hamper the ability of a fellow Coloradan to (quoting the bill) “…participate in the political process, elect the candidates of their choice, or otherwise influence the outcome of elections”?
The verbiage indicates that it is intended to prevent or stop voter suppression, voter dilution, and voter qualifications relating to someone’s gender status, but neither the summary or the legislative declaration in the bill give a sense of where things like this are actually happening in Colorado.
I did actually put some thought into it, having to force myself to abandon the cartoonish image that first came to mind. Namely a fat southern sheriff and his deputies standing outside a Front Range polling location with a sign telling minorities and transgendered people to go home.
Closer to reality, the only examples that might possibly come close are a flap over Weld County’s redistricting, and perhaps someone requiring ID that has a transgendered person’s previous identity on it (but I’ve not heard of actual cases here). The Weld County case just recently went in front of a “skeptical” Colorado Supreme Court. In other words, an alleged case of gerrymandering is already working its way through our existing system of checks and balances. It’s getting reviewed. With regard to transgendered Coloradans, I don’t see how the language of the bill would prevent the sort of problem I mention above.
Feeding the trial lawyers
But it gets worse. Even before its creation, the way a laser works was pretty well understood. I wish I could tell you the same about SB25-001. It’s a mess of ill-defined terms that any lawyer hungry to start racking up billable hours would love.
I read things like “polarized voting,” defined in the bill as “voting in which there is a divergence in the candidate or political preferences, or electoral choices, of members in a protected class from the candidate or political preferences, or electoral choices, of other electors in the political subdivision.” Outside of this being specially for what the bill sponsors deem protected classes, they just described nearly every election I’ve voted in.
If they were allowed to, I bet Boulder Republicans ( a lonely political minority) would love to join the “protected” class and use this law to seek relief from a judge for electoral dysfunction. Per the law, polarized voting is something a judge would be using to help determine things like whether or not there is voter suppression or dilution.
Over and over in the summary, and in the bill, it mentions intent. Intent to suppress voters. Intent to dilute them. This is great on paper, but not so much in reality. In reality one must confront questions such as “how do we establish intent?” Since no human can read minds, intent must be established in court. That means lawsuits. That also means uncertainty, money, and time.
This law opens the door wide to a whole lot of legal wrangling both by allowing for arguing about intent, but also by telling judges to “liberally construe” the law itself (put sarcastically, this means allowing the judge to follow their heart instead of the text of the law).
On top of this, there are a series of requirements for accessibility and ballot language that will be tough to implement for smaller counties like mine which are already struggling to pay for previous state mandates.
A problematic solution
The sponsors of SB25-001 clearly have good intentions. I, like other reasonable Coloradans want every eligible elector to be able to vote and make their voice heard. At the same time, the sponsors seem to have little sense of how to effect their goals. They also seemingly have little sense of how their policy would play out in reality across the hundreds of electoral districts across our state. Outside of being another chance to divide us all along along lines the progressive sponsors think are appropriate, this bill will complicate the hell out of elections, raise costs to hold them, and mainly serve to benefit trial lawyers.
This particular solution in search of a problem is quite problematic.
Cory Gaines is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains and also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack.