Ban-Fracking Groups Have Very Little Wiggle Room to Qualify for Colorado Ballot

Tuesday August 9, 2016

Tweet from Colorado Secretary of State Spokeswoman Lynn Bartels

National activist organizations are claiming to have turned in a sufficient number of  signatures to put their extreme Keep-It-In-The-Ground (KIITG) agenda before Colorado voters this fall, but there are some big questions as to whether the groups have actually collected at least 98,492 valid signatures required as the validation process gets underway. From the Denver Business Journal:

“The organizers said they collected “over 100,000” signatures in support of each of the ballot petitions, but said they couldn’t be more precise about the final tally because they were still collecting signatures Monday morning.” (Emphasis added)

As Colorado Secretary of State Spokeswoman Lynn Bartels observes in the tweet featured above, there were apparently a lot of boxes delivered but not so many petitions. Of course, delivering empty boxes to create the illusion of broad support is a page right out of the ban-fracking playbook. For example, when the anti-fracking group Environment North Carolina delivered what they claimed were “more than 50,000” petitions signed by “opponents of fracking,” the state’s governor’s office was left with a big mess of empty boxes to clean up. The News Observer View Full Article