Federal judge declines to immediately block Colorado law meant to persuade voters not to cut their taxes
A federal judge Wednesday left in place a 2021 law intended to make it harder to persuade Colorado voters to cut their taxes, ruling against a conservative dark-money group suing to block the measure as it seeks to ask voters to cut sales and property taxes.
House Bill 1321, passed by Democrats and signed by Gov. Jared Polis, requires any citizen-initiated ballot measure cutting taxes to include a warning about three programs and services that would be most affected by the cuts. (For state tax reductions, that’s likely to always be K-12 education, higher education, and health care policy and financing, namely Medicaid.)
Advance Colorado, a political nonprofit, argues that the law violates their right to free speech by forcing them to mislead voters with “poison-pill language” since not all tax reductions will reduce funding because of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
The nonprofit, which The Colorado Sun refers to as a dark-money group because it doesn’t have to reveal its donors, asked for a preliminary injunction to temporarily block enforcement of the law while its lawsuit, filed against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Polis, plays out.