With 14 amendments and propositions set to appear on Colorado’s ballots come November, several students and local groups met for a Vote for Your Future panel Oct. 5 at Colorado State University’s Lory Student Center. 

Hosted by the Planned Parenthood Generation Action, other local nonprofits and third-party political groups convened to discuss multiple ballot measures, all centering on individual rights and freedoms. The panel featured four speakers, each representing one of the tabling groups in attendance.

Ian Whalen, the Denver regional organizer for Freedom to Marry Colorado, first took the microphone and directed the audience to Amendment J on their ballots. If passed, the amendment would remove the ban on same-sex marriage from the Colorado Constitution.

“Back in 2006, the state of Colorado voters here passed — very narrowly — an amendment called Amendment 43, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman,” Whalen said. “And this law remains on our books to this day.”

While the ban is not actively enforced today due to Obergefell v. Hodges, which federally recognized same-sex marriages in 2015, it could go into effect if Obergefell were to be overturned. This would impact the about 25,000 same-sex couples in Colorado and “any same-sex couple that would want to get married in the future,” Whalen said.

Whalen concluded his segment by urging audience members to vote yes on Amendment J before handing the microphone over to Ashley Stroessler, a representative of the Colorado Working Families Party, a grassroots third party.

Stroessler drew the audience’s attention toward Proposition 131, the Top-Four Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative, a program that, if enacted into law, would implement a top-four primary election and ranked choice voting for future Colorado elections.

“(A top-four primary) means everybody would receive one primary ballot, and they would vote the normal way, and the top four vote-getters would then move to the general election,” Stroessler said. “And in that general election, you would get ranked choice voting.”

Stroessler cautioned the audience against supporting Prop. 131 for two reasons: lack of government involvement in the proposition’s creation and the potential costs of it. 

“What’s also a huge problem is that no elected officials or election officials — so the county clerks or any of the offices that handle elections — were consulted in the making of this bill,” Stroessler said.

Stroessler then presented the financial burden that would fall on taxpayers if the proposition was passed: $21 million. 

The panel then moved on to abortion rights with Cidney Fisk and Cobalt Advocates, an independent, Colorado-based abortion rights organization. Attendees were directed to Amendment 79.

With the Reproductive Health Equity Act, the statutory right to seek an abortion was written into law. The bill will be expanded by the Protections For Accessing Reproductive Health Care package, which included three bills that went into effect April 2023. It requires private insurers to fully cover abortion-related health care and STI treatments. However, a previous amendment prevents those on public insurance from receiving the same benefits.

“We passed an amendment back in (1984) by less than a percent of a vote, which mimics the federal Hyde Amendment,” Fisk said. “(Meaning) you can’t use public funds for abortions.”

Amendment 79 seeks to enshrine the right to abortion into the state constitution and allows the use of public funds for abortions. This would treat abortion-related health care like any other medical procedure under state employee plans or Medicaid, as it has a zero-dollar fiscal note. 

“We have this class of people with private insurance who can all get (an) abortion, and then we have a class of people with public insurance who can’t get abortions,” Fisk said. “That’s discriminatory.”

After urging people to vote yes on Amendment 79, Fisk welcomed Rocky Mountain High School social studies teacher and representative of the Colorado Education Association Wendy Bergman to the microphone. Bergman directed the audience to Amendment 80, which seeks to enshrine the right to school choice into the state constitution, despite Coloradans already having that right.

“So Colorado families actually have the right to school choice,” Bergman said. “They have since 1994 — it’s not necessary in our constitution. And in fact, this bill goes a lot farther. It defines school choice and opens the door for public tax dollars to go to private education in almost any form, including future innovations in education.”

This new funding allotment would pull funding from schools outside the metro area, where private schools aren’t as prevalent.

“It really hurts rural school districts,” Bergman said. “They don’t have private school options in the same way that students or families in the Denver Metro do, and so this reduces the amount of money that is available to go to those charter or those rural school districts.”

While acknowledging typical public school is not the best fit for all students, Bergman argued that the risk is too great and urged audience members to vote no on Amendment 80.

“As a public school teacher, I know that some kids need alternative structures in education, but what we don’t want to do is go backwards in school funding when we’re still barely at the minimum of what we need to do to make this career sustainable for our educators,” Bergman said.

As the meeting concluded, Cobalt student intern and sophomore political science student Sophia Johnson shared what she hoped attendees took away from the event.

“With this being an election year for the presidency, there’s a lot of fear about what can happen,” Johnson said. “I think it’s important for us to focus on what we control within our state and how we can make our community safer.”

Reach Katie Fisher at news@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.