Colorado judge hears challenge to Amendment 87 signatures

A Denver District Court judge heard about 10 hours of testimony on October 19 in a lawsuit challenging signatures that helped qualify Colorado Amendment 87 for the November ballot. The hearing ended without resolving whether the disputed signatures should count or whether the graduated-income-tax measure could remain on the ballot.

Judge Heidi Kutcher was reported to expect a ruling by October 21. That was her stated expectation, not a guaranteed deadline. At the time of the hearing-day reports, the case remained pending and the measure’s ballot status had not changed.

The lawsuit challenges 9,849 signatures i

Michael Andre Hancock’s lawsuit challenges the signature-gathering and certification process. It alleges that 69 paid petition circulators were not properly registered and that the 9,849 signatures they collected should be rejected. Those are allegations in the lawsuit, not findings by the court.

The disputed signatures are significant in relation to Colorado’s stated threshold of 124,238 signatures. Amendment 87 was certified with 130,938. An earlier report on the lawsuit said that excluding the challenged signatures would leave 121,089—3,149 below the threshold. By comparison, the certified total was 6,700 above it.

That arithmetic shows why the challenge could affect ballot qualification, but it does not decide the legal issue. Hancock’s challenge turns on whether the alleged registration problem provides grounds under the initiative rules to invalidate signatures. The judge heard competing positions on that question.

A state official testified that the applicable initiative rules did not permit signatures to be invalidated on the ground advanced by Hancock. That testimony presented the state’s position; it did not settle the dispute. The hearing concluded without a reported decision on whether the circulators were improperly registered or whether their signatures could be excluded.

Amendment 87 would change the state income-tax structure i

The Colorado ballot information booklet describes Amendment 87 as a proposal to replace the state’s uniform income-tax rate with a graduated structure. It says additional revenue would support K-12 education, health care, and early-childhood care and education.

The case puts the measure’s qualification—not the proposed tax structure itself—before the court. Hancock’s lawsuit seeks to remove Amendment 87 from the November ballot over the challenged signatures. The dispute therefore bears on whether Colorado voters will have the opportunity to decide on the proposal, while the hearing itself did not change its ballot status.

The proceeding was held in Denver District Court, a Colorado state court. The next reported step was Kutcher’s expected ruling by October 21; the hearing-day coverage did not report a decision or its reasoning.