As the American revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected." The right to vote is what unites people of all religious and cultural backgrounds and political philosophies as Americans. Protecting and expanding that right has...

This week's Westword cover story, by Andy Kopsa, reported that Denver-based WAIT Training managed to circumvent both Governor Ritter's rejection of federal abstinence-only funds and Colorado law requiring comprehensive sex education in order to obtain federal grant money through the Colorado State Board of Education. Westword also reported...

Colorado State Treasurer Walker Stapleton raised eyebrows yesterday when he testified before Congress in support of a public pension fund transparency bill. While Stapleton argued in favor of transparency in Washington, DC, he has been resisting it here in Colorado, refusing to disclose how much time...

Buried in the bipartisan state budget compromise unveiled yesterday was a steep cut to the tiny budget of the Independent Ethics Commission (IEC), reducing the commission's staff from two to one and placing Colorado solidly in last place in staff support among the forty-plus states that...

Campaign finance law can be complicated, usually because corporate-rights advocates convince courts to announce increasingly difficult hurdles against popular efforts to regulate the flow of money in elections. But in the case of Colorado Springs, it's complicated because of the uniquely Colorado institution of municipal home rule. And the stakes...

Colorado's ballot initiative system was severely abused this year, when four of the six voter-initiated measures on the statewide ballot made it to Election Day without disclosure of who paid for the printing of petitions or the collection of signatures to qualify those measures for the ballot. Reform already in...

Long after he left office as the first legislator in Colorado history to receive a formal censure, Douglas Bruce has managed to find himself in more ethical trouble this year than most elected officials.

In 2010 alone, Bruce has found himself in ethical trouble on...

Last week, Administrative Law Judge Robert Spencer ruled that Clear the Bench Colorado, a group dedicated to ousting justices of the Colorado Supreme Court in the November general election, must register with the Colorado Secretary of State as a political committee. The main effect of the ruling is that Clear...

You may have seen the story in June about the "missing" moon rock that had been given to the State of Colorado by the federal government to celebrate the successful Apollo missions in the '70s. It turned out that when former Governor John Vanderhoof left office in 1975,...

KMGH-TV's recent expose of a lavish Pebble Beach golf trip taken by three members of the board that oversees Pinnacol Assurance, the state workers' compensation insurance fund, earned bipartisan outrage. The likelihood that Pinnacol itself paid for the trip - which can't be confirmed because Pinnacol filed suit...

On March 22, Colorado Attorney General John Suthers announced that Colorado would join the lawsuit against the federal Affordable Care Act that was filed by a number of state attorneys general in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida. Of primary concern to Colorado Ethics Watch...

Yesterday, the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission (IEC) unanimously found no violation of Colorado ethics laws by Rex Burns, the manager of the Boxelder Stormwater Authority in Larimer County, who was alleged to have misused his former position as a Larimer County employee to become the sole candidate for...

Ethics Watch released its annual list of the top scandals in Colorado during 2009. We don't attempt to rank the scandals - each of these very different events could arguably be declared the "worst." Here are the five scandals we thought deserved to be remembered as we enter a new...

One of the benefits of creating the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission (IEC) as an independent commission, not subject to control by the governor or the legislature, is that the IEC is not bound by the governor's hiring freeze order. As a gesture of goodwill during economic hard times, the IEC...

Where is the line between neutral telephone polling designed to gather information from voters, and a push poll designed to influence voters through carefully crafted, loaded questions?  That's the interesting question the Longmont Election Committee is scheduled to consider at a public meeting on October 26.  But if the advocacy...

Colorado's Independent Ethics Commission is still in its infancy, but already it has shown an unfortunate penchant for secrecy. Colorado Ethics Watch won an open records lawsuit against the Ethics Commission in May, securing release of documents about requests for ethics opinions that the commission had illegally withheld. Last...