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by Megan Verlee, Colorado Public Radio News, Colorado Newsline
October 20, 2024
Every election is a direct reminder of the power — and complexity — of democracy. This year’s is also an outlet for anxieties, across the political spectrum, about how democracy itself is fairing.
“Democracy and good government” ranked as a top issue for a quarter of the Coloradans who participated in the Voter Voices survey. Moderates and liberals ranked it higher than conservatives, but it made the top three for all three groups.
That umbrella term captures many different concerns. For opponents of former president Donald Trump, the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 continues to loom large and they fear a repeat should he lose again. Among those who identified as conservative in the Voter Voices survey, 60% said they were “not at all confident” that the election would be conducted fairly across the country as opposed to slightly more than 10% of self-identified liberals. (Confidence in local elections was much higher for both groups.)
Survey respondents who said democracy is their top concern wrote of the country’s polarization, its clashing worldviews, the fear that Trump will act on his threats to turn government against his perceived enemies and, from Trump supporters, the belief that President Joe Biden already has. They worry about increasing political violence. The presidential campaign has been marred by two attempts to assassinate Trump. Judges hearing cases against Jan. 6 participants have faced waves of threats, as have election officials across the country, including here in Colorado.
Congressional candidates and ballot measures.
It’s not only violence and extremism that have many worried for the state of our democracy — many voters say they have lost faith that our political institutions are capable of meeting the serious challenges of the moment.
In national polling, only 16% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. Views of other branches of the federal government have also slumped in recent years. Fewer than half of Americans view the U.S. Supreme Court favorably, a sharp decline as the court has moved rapidly to the right in the past few years. For most of his presidency, Biden’s approval rating has stayed below 50%. Trump was below 50% for his entire time in office.
For many, good government also means “small government,” with less of an official footprint in their lives.
“We’re registered Republicans, but we are pro-freedom,” is how Sean Pond of Nucla in Montrose County, describes his views and his wife’s.
The Ponds are leaders of an effort to squash a proposal that would use — or as Danielle Pond puts it, “abuse” — the federal Antiquities Act to designate roughly 400,000 acres of public lands around the Dolores River as a national monument.
“From the small-town mayor to the president, the only power that those government officials — public servants — have is the power that we the people give them and I think that’s gotten lost in translation,” Sean Pond said in an interview. “Now we live in a world where the government rules us, the government dictates to us. We don’t have a say. We’ve kind of lost the voice of ‘we the people.’”
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Christine Soto of Denver, a supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris, said in an interview that she is especially concerned “about the assault on voting rights.”
From gerrymandering to the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act to state and local governments reducing voting hours or otherwise making voting more onerous, “there have been more and more attempts to suppress, from my perspective, to suppress people’s vote, to make it more difficult for people to vote, and I find that very scary,” she said. “.. I really believe democracy is about representation.”
As Coloradans consider their ballots, the candidates they choose each have their own views on how to strengthen democracy, nationally and in Colorado. There’s also a major ballot question that could rewrite how the state chooses its leaders in the future.
If you’re most concerned about the state of democracy, here’s where the issue shows up in this election.
Presidential race
Vice President Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have made defense of democracy a major part of her campaign pitch, arguing Trump presents an existential threat to the nation’s tradition of peaceful transfers of power and to the rule of law.
Trump is the first former president of the United States to have been convicted of a felony and has been indicted in cases involving federal election interference and attempting to unlawfully overturn Georgia’s election results. A U.S. District judge threw out a separate indictment charging Trump with unlawful retention of classified documents and a special prosecutor has appealed that ruling. Trump has insisted upon his innocence, claiming that as president he was immune from prosecution and that he is the victim of a weaponized legal system.
Harris supports both the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore elements of the 1964 Voting Rights Act struck down in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would expand early and mail-in voting nationwide, among other things.
Harris has also said that she supports elimination of the Senate filibuster for abortion rights.
For his part, Trump continues to falsely claim that he won in 2020 and to stoke fears of fraud among his supporters in this election as well. When asked at a recent forum whether he would encourage a peaceful transition of power if he lost again, Trump did not answer the question. Instead he described the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a day of “love and peace” and defended the actions of the rioters, whom he has said he would pardon if he wins.
Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, has said he would not have certified the 2020 election.
Harris and her surrogates have repeatedly emphasized the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as an indication of how a second Trump administration might try to remake the federal government; the document was written mainly by people who served in his administration. Over more than 900 pages, the document details proposals to concentrate more power in the executive branch, dismantle government agencies, and roll back regulation, among other things.
While Trump allies were involved in its drafting, he has said he had nothing to do with it and isn’t reading it.
Congressional races
The men and women running to represent Colorado in Congress support a range of reforms they believe would make the government work better, although neither the House nor the Senate have done much in recent years to change how they do business.
In the 3rd District race, both Democrat Adam Frisch and Republican Jeff Hurd said they would push for a ban on stock trading by members of Congress. Additionally, Frisch supports Congressional term limits, while Hurd said the House should move toward restricting bills to a single subject. Frisch has also said the first thing he’d do if elected is join the Problem Solvers Caucus in pursuit of good governance.
In the 8th District, incumbent Democrat Yadira Caraveo touts her role as a cosponsor of the Freedom to Vote Act. Her opponent, Republican state Rep. Gabe Evans, said tackling the budgeting process, including doing away with deficit spending, would be his top reform priority.
When it comes to the nation’s election systems, Democrats have generally aligned behind bills that expand early and mail-in options. Republicans have focused on concerns that non-citizens might be voting, something that research has found almost never happens. This summer, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who represents the 3rd Congressional District but is running in the 4th, and other Republicans attempted to pass the SAVE Act, which would have required people to prove their citizenship in order to vote, a change from the current system where the government uses its own databases to verify eligibility.
Boebert has been one of Trump’s staunchest supporters and has said the election was stolen from him. She joined the 147 Republicans who voted against certifying the Arizona and Pennsylvania election results. On the morning of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, she tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
Legislative races
Much of how Colorado’s democracy works lies in the hands of the state legislature. Just over a decade ago, Democratic lawmakers moved the state to its current system of all-mail ballots, although the transition was implemented under Republican secretaries of state. Since that time, Democrats have passed other voting reforms, like allowing people to register and vote on Election Day and registering eligible voters automatically through the DMV.
Democrats also signed Colorado on to the National Popular Vote Compact, a deal that aims to elect presidents through the popular vote and not the electoral college. (Colorado voters later confirmed their support for the popular vote compact.)
Republican lawmakers have tried, without success, to require photo ID for people to sign up to vote.
Lawmakers from both parties tout many of the rules Colorado’s legislature works under. Bills must be focused on just one subject, and all legislation gets at least one hearing. Colorado is also required to pass a balanced budget and maintain at least a 15% fiscal reserve.
However, in recent years, the Democratic majority has been dinged repeatedly for skirting transparency rules. A court ordered them to stop using a secret balloting system to choose which bills they wanted to prioritize in the budgeting process. And last year, two Democratic representatives sued their own leadership for violating Colorado’s open meetings laws. That resulted in lawmakers revising the state’s open meeting law, changes which enabled them to hold closed-door discussions about tax cuts this summer.
Local races
Elections in Colorado are administered by each county’s clerk and recorder, the same office that also manages DMVs, issues marriage licenses and keeps track of real estate transactions.
Clerk is an elected, partisan office, but for the most part, the 64 clerks serving in Colorado operate in a collegial and cooperative fashion. They are at the front line of helping the public understand and trust their elections, and urge people with doubts to reach out with their questions.
“We’re the ones that do this and know and understand the responsibility that we have,” said Weld County Clerk Carly Koppes, a Republican. “It’s a huge responsibility.”
There has been one notable exception to this culture of election security: Tina Peters. The former Mesa County clerk allowed an unauthorized person to copy her voting machine hard drives and attend a secure build, a highly sensitive software update. For her role in that plot, Peters was recently sentenced to nine years in prison and jail.
“Clerks across the state are pleased to see justice done today,” Matt Crane, the head of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said in a statement after her conviction in August. “We take seriously our role as guardians of the best election process in the nation and are grateful to see the justice system hold those who would harm our elections accountable.”
Clerks are elected to four year terms in off year elections. The office is on the ballot in two places this year — Larminer and Summit counties — to fill vacant positions. The rest will be up for election in 2026.
Ballot issues
Colorado voters have repeatedly used the ballot box to reform how our state is run. Those efforts include the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which requires a public vote on all tax increases, as well Amendment 41, which limited the gifts elected officials can accept and an ethics office to oversee them.
More recently, voters took redistricting out of the hands of lawmakers and added an explicit ban on noncitizens voting to the state constitution.
This year, the ballot contains possibly the biggest change yet to how democracy works in Colorado. Proposition 131 would end party primaries and pick election winners through a ranked choice process.
Supporters argue that Prop. 131’s changes would give an advantage to the kind of moderate candidates who might currently struggle to get through a party primary, and it would reduce the political risk for politicians of all stripes to compromise and work across the aisle.
However, local election officials warn the system Prop. 131 would set up would be complicated to administer and more difficult to audit. And they worry voters will either not understand the new system, or mistrust the outcomes it produces.
Amendment K is an administrative measure, but it seeks to move up by one week the deadline for citizens to submit signatures for ballot initiatives.
Colorado News Collaborative Managing Editor Tina Griego contributed to this report.
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