November 07, 2008 01:33 AM UTC

Amendment 46 Narrowly Fails

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• by: Colorado Pols

Finally called today by the Rocky Mountain News:

Colorado becomes the first state to reject an initiative being pushed across the country that would have eliminated race- and gender-based affirmative action programs by voting down Amendment 46.

By a slim margin, voters turned down the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative backed by California millionaire Ward Connerly and a local committee headed by Jessica Corry of the Golden-based Independence Institute.

Connerly’s initiative had passed 10 years ago in California and since then has passed in Washington, Michigan and Nebraska. He intends to take it to other states in an effort to end affirmative action programs.

Results remained too close to call election night and throughout Wednesday, but returns have continued to pile up and the slender lead widened for the “no” side.

“I am incredibly proud an honored to have been part of the first campaign to defeat Connerly’s initiative,” said Melissa Hart, leader of the No on 46 campaign. “It’s a great testament to the people of Colorado that when they understood the truth about the initiative, they rejected it. Coloradans stand for equal opportunity.”

Theories abound on why Coloradans rejected the affirmative action ban when liberal bastions like California and Washington state passed it. Most everybody agrees that the presentation of Amendment 46 was inherently deceptive, in common with other states: a percentage of voters went to the polls believing the proposal did something very different than it actually did.

Other points to factor include a very clear en masse rejection of all the ballot initiatives on the part of many Colorado voters this year, and the possibility that the wording of Amendment 46 was so deceptively slick that some low-information conservative voters thought it was a liberal initiative and voted against it.

We think both of those might have accounted for some number of votes, but there was always something unseemly about this initiative and its proponents. This is a sentiment we’ve heard from both sides in the last couple of days. Coloradans are sick of these shopped-around multistate wedge issue ballot initiatives, gun-shy from the unintended consequences of some nutty thinktank’s “panacea.” And it’s a hard, if unfortunate fact that many of the same voters who passed 2006’s gay marriage ban in Colorado, for example, treat racial and gender discrimination as a wholly different matter.

We’re sticking with our original view: a just-enough percentage of Colorado voters figured out on their own that Amendment 46 is something other than advertised, and said no.