"State minimum wage" makes Colorado ballot
DENVER, August 11, 2016 -- Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams announced today that the proposed ballot measure "State Minimum Wage" will be on the ballot this November.
The proposed constitutional amendment would boost Colorado's minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020.
Backers of No. 101 submitted their petitions to the Secretary of State's Office on July 26. 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.
Petition verification summary:
| Total number of qualified signatures submitted | 189,419 |
| 5% of qualified signatures submitted (random sample) | 9,471 |
| Total number of entries accepted (valid) from the random sample | 5,747 |
| Total number of entries rejected (invalid) from the random sample | 3,724 |
| Number of projected valid signatures from the random sample | 114,939 |
| Total number of signatures required for placement on ballot | 98,492 |
| Projected percentage of required valid signatures | 116.70% |
Seven other ballot measures recently turned in are still under review. The Secretary of State has until Sept. 7 to notify proponents of the outcome.
Two items of note:
During signature processing by a separate state agency, a section of the petition was misplaced. Section No. 6570 contained three signature lines marked for review in the random sample. Because the section was misplaced before determining the validity of the three lines, the Secretary of State's Office credited the proponents with three valid signatures. As an ample number of valid signatures were submitted, the three signatures did not affect the outcome of the random sample.
Also, that same state agency identified a petition section that contained several potentially forged signature lines. The Secretary of State does not conduct signature verification when reviewing petitions so our office has referred the questionable section to the Attorney General’s Office. Section No. 6469 had one line marked for review in the random sample. After reviewing that line, our office included it in the number of projected valid signatures.
