Only 2 Colorado Issues Remain Ahead of Oil & Gas in Queue
The Colorado Secretary of State’s office reported today that the signatures for one more of the five remaining citizen initiatives have now been counted and verified. The cigarette tax initiative was verified and will be on the Colorado ballot in November, the Secretary said in a press release.
Remaining ahead of the two proposed anti-oil and gas amendments are only two initiatives, both concerning primary elections. So far, five citizen initiatives have been deemed sufficient to be placed on the November ballot in Colorado.
Backers of the “New cigarette and tobacco taxes” proposal submitted their petition signatures on Aug. 8. A 5-percent random sample of the submitted signatures projected the number of valid signatures to be greater than 110 percent of the total number of signatures required for placement on the ballot.
Ballot Issue Verification Math
New Cigarette tax petition verification summary:
| Total number of qualified signatures submitted | 161,412 |
| 5% of qualified signatures submitted (random sample) | 8,071 |
| Total number of entries accepted (valid) from the random sample | 5,848 |
| Total number of entries rejected (invalid) from the random sample | 2,223 |
| Number of projected valid signatures from the random sample | 116,954 |
| Total number of signatures required for placement on ballot | 98,492 |
| Projected percentage of required valid signatures | 118.74% |
Colorado anti-oil & gas initiatives supported by global environmental organizations
One of the two oil and gas related citizen initiatives would drastically slow development of oil and gas resources in Colorado, the other would virtually stop development—if they pass the Secretary of State’s verification process, if they make it onto the November ballot and if they receive a favorable vote from the Colorado electorate.
Initiative 75 would grant local municipalities the ability to say whether they want new wells, hydraulic fracturing and other oil and gas operations in their city, town or county limits. Initiative 78 would amend the Colorado constitution to prohibit drilling, fracturing and other operations within 2,500 feet of any inhabited structure, waterways and other areas. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, who has previously had the oversight to say who drills and where, says that replacing the current 500 foot setback with a mandatory 2,500 foot setback would remove 90% of the state from possible new oil and gas development.
The signature collectors for the anti-oil and gas sponsors included paid circulators and organizations like Greenpeace and 350.org, both of which are global environmental activist organizations that support the “Keep it in the Ground” strategy to shut down fossil fuel development. Volunteers in Colorado were emotional when they turned in their boxes of petitions at the deadline on Aug. 8.
Greenpeace photo: volunteers are emotional as they deliver boxes of signatures to place two anti-oil and gas initiatives on Colorado’s November ballot.
The Secretary of State has until Sept. 7 to count and verify the signatures or issue a statement of insufficiency for all the remaining ballot initiatives. A number of securities, energy and political analysts have calculated there weren’t enough signatures turned in to make it through the math process required to be on the ballot, but the Secretary of State’s spokesperson Lynn Bartels said no one will know until they are counted. The backers said they turned in just over 100,000 signatures for each of the two proposed initiatives, but is it enough to make the ballot?
“We have not counted the signatures so we are not announcing anything,” Bartels told Oil & Gas 360® on August 15.
