Amendment 85 seeks to make Colorado’s ballot easier to read. But it’s not that simple.

When Papa Dia immigrated from Senegal to Colorado almost 30 years ago, one of the biggest challenges was the language barrier. That’s part of what inspired him to found the African Leadership Group in Aurora, which provides language classes.

He also organizes voter information events, because there’s so much confusion this time of year.

“Every election cycle I get phone calls, people asking me, who should I vote for and what does this mean?” said Dia. “If you have challenges to understand what’s in those ballots, imagine for those people that English is not their first language.”

Dia supports Amendment 85, which would change Colorado’s constitution to require all state and local ballot questions to be written at an eighth-grade reading level or lower. Advance Colorado, a conservative political nonprofit that is responsible for six of the questions on this year’s long ballot, said the idea was born out of meeting with voters over the years.

“And they’d say, ‘Why is this so confusing? Why is it long? Why did you write it that way?’” said Michael Fields, president of Advance Colorado. “And they don’t realize that the title board writes it, that there’s rules, all these different things that make it complex.”

Lowering the reading level from somewhere near PhD level to 8th grade will increase understanding, no matter the issue or side, Fields said.

Amendment 85 is an attempt to force strict simplicity on a notoriously difficult issue: How to boil down logically difficult law changes into a generally understandable “yes” or “no” question. 

While opponents of Amendment 85 agree that Colorado’s ballots are too complex, they say imposing a vague readability standard into the state constitution would only create more confusion. It’s not an easy thing to measure, so who decides what qualifies?

The thorny details would be left to state lawmakers and the courts to sort out for years to come. 

“There’s no reason to lock a specific fix permanently into the state constitution,” said Beth Hendrix, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Colorado.

Earlier this year, the league supported a bill at the state legislature that requires ballot titles be written using “accessible language,” allowing the title board to consider avoiding legal or technical jargon when possible, eschewing unnecessary qualifiers or double negatives. 

“Colorado ballots are basically one of the most difficult ballots to read,” said state Rep. Kenny Van Nguyen, D-Broomfield, who cosponsored the bill. “You need a PhD or a law degree to understand your ballot.”

He’s in favor of simplifying the ballot, but he opposes Amendment 85.

“The courts are going to have to decide what is an 8th-grade reading level. That is subjective, arguably,” said Nguyen.

What is an 8th-grade reading level?

Half a century ago, the military recognized that its millions of pages of training documents and manuals were too complex for enlisted men and women. First, they needed to measure the problem. 

The Department of Defense eventually adopted the Flesch-Kincaid formula, developed in 1975 by Navy researcher J. Peter Kincaid and colleagues based on earlier work by Rudolf Flesch.

The formula uses sentence length and syllables per word to estimate a grade level.

In a , Navy researchers described a computer system using about $40,000 in equipment to calculate reading levels and suggest ways to simplify technical manuals. Reading formulas worked as a measure for a large quantity of documents.

But the report noted care must be taken when writing to a lower grade level, that oversimplifying documents sometimes sacrificed precision when complicated words were replaced with simpler ones.

Later, Microsoft would incorporate the Flesch-Kincaid formula into its Office products. Now there are multiple online calculators that will evaluate grade level using multiple formulas, including Flesch-Kincaid.

Amendment 85 does not mandate any particular formula or process to determine if something is grade-level. But experts caution against relying solely on readability formulas or AI calculations.

“My worry is that they will put it into a calculator and do a score,” said Peter Foltz, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies reading comprehension. “I think particularly for anything like tax law, it’s going to be just very hard to say that things have to be written at an 8th-grade level.”

Foltz said readability formulas work better when there’s a large amount of material to assess. Ballot titles, on the other hand, are just one long sentence.

Foltz said determining whether people actually understand a ballot question is more complicated than calculating its reading level. He said hands-on user testing could help, but he had a hard time imagining how you’d accomplish that for a ballot question.

“Trying to do user testing on this is going to be very hard,” said Foltz. “So I don’t have a really great idea of what the right solution would be for this.”

Mark Grueskin, an election attorney at Recht Kornfeld, who represents liberal and Democratic issues, sounded almost angry at the multitude of shortcomings he sees in Amendment 85.

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He questioned how the title board would realistically determine if a ballot question is understandable to a middle-school student.

“Every title board meeting will be dominated by field trips by 8th-grade classes where kids will be asked, ‘do you understand what this says and do you know what it means?’” said Grueskin.

“Wolf in sheep’s clothing”

Grueskin said that much of the attention is focused on the first part of Amendment 85, which sets a reading standard for ballot language, and less on the second part, which, in his view, would limit disclosure of the impact of various fiscal measures to voters. 

That second provision would prohibit lawmakers from requiring specific wording in citizen-initiated ballot questions if it conflicts with the new 8th-grade reading standard.

“So this has very little to do with voter understanding,” said Grueskin. “And has everything to do with ensuring that the legislature can’t in the future pass laws to make sure that people understand exactly what a ballot measure does.”

“It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he added.

The state legislature passed a law in 2021 requiring ballot questions for certain tax-cut initiatives to disclose projected revenue losses and which major areas of government spending could be affected.

Nguyen, who co-sponsored this year’s accessible ballot language law, remembers helping his immigrant parents understand their ballots when he was in fifth grade. He supports making ballot questions easier to understand, but worries Amendment 85 could limit future legislative requirements for financial disclosures.

“I actually oppose Amendment 85 because I call it having a poison pill,” said Nguyen. “Where they basically handcuff future legislation and fiscal notes and fiscal policy and it really defeats the purpose.”

Fields disputes that characterization, saying Amendment 85 would not bar the legislature from mandating certain language, only that it must conform to 8th-grade reading standards.

“I think that we do have some times when the legislature comes in and says there’s mandated language,” said Fields. “This would say any language that is mandated, whether I believe it should be there or not, has to be at an 8th-grade level.”

Would TABOR have qualified?

With the criteria for future consideration unknown, it’s still pretty likely that most, if not all, of Colorado’s prior or current ballot propositions and constitutional amendments might not qualify as 8th-grade reading level — including some of its most famous.

In 1992, voters approved an amendment to the constitution called the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, a 61-word, single-sentence ballot question that continues to spawn reams of case law.

Douglas Bruce, its author, argued in an interview that the amendment was already written in plain language.

“I wrote it at the level that would be understood by 8th-graders,” said Bruce. “I didn’t think TABOR was complex. So TABOR was user-friendly.”

The ballot question that appeared before voters wasn’t even close, at least in terms of the Flesch-Kincaid grade level score. The 1992 TABOR ballot question scored approximately a 30th-grade reading level using three online Flesch-Kincaid calculators.

Amendment 85 isn’t much better. It scored an average of 29th-grade level among the three calculators.

Fields noted that the ballot title was not written by him, and the convention of using one long sentence is what inflates the score. If Amendment 85 passes, Fields noted that the title board will likely be forced to use multiple shorter sentences to conform to an 8th-grade standard.

Controversial backers?

At the African Leadership Group in Aurora, a small group of residents recently gathered for a ballot education event. When Amendment 85 came up, Papa Dia made an impassioned plea.

“People that were born in this country, that went to school here, have all degrees, they get the ballot, they still don’t understand,” said Dia. “Imagine then for people like us, English is not our first language, in some cases we did not go to school here, so they’re asking us to vote on things that we don’t understand.”

Pushback came from a community member, Lea Steed, who said that she did not trust Advance Colorado.

“They’re not for the common people, they are for the billionaires and millionaires of this state,” said Steed.

Dia acknowledged that people will have different opinions and that’s the nature of democracy, but to him it didn’t matter who is behind the measure. He sees it as good policy for people to understand their ballot.

Advance Colorado does not disclose its donors, but Michael Fields said the average voter doesn’t care where an idea comes from. 

“If they agree or disagree, they’re going to vote accordingly,” said Fields. “And I do believe that it’s one of the sad things about politics right now is like, ‘Hey, even if this is a good idea, some people are going to say no because of who’s bringing it.’ And I don’t buy into that brand of politics.”