On Friday, state Senate Democrats attempted to amend a campus free speech bill to include voter registration activity among the kinds of “speech” the bill marks out in particular for protection.

All 18 Senate Republicans voted down the amendment on the Senate floor. Democrats took turns speaking in favor of the amendment.

The bill now enumerates “a student’s constitutional right to speak” as “speaking verbally, holding a sign, or distributing flyers or other material.”

Sponsor Tim Neville, a Littleton Republican, argued that voter registration was already protected speech, but he didn’t seem adamantly opposed to the idea of including with the other types of speech listed in the bill. He added that he welcomed House members to take up the discussion after the bill moved through the Senate.

Sen. Steve Fenberg, a Boulder Democrat and the founder of youth voter registration group New Era Colorado, led the effort to amend the bill. He said the act of registering to vote is protected but that acting to help or encourage others to register to vote “may not be protected.”

Lizzy Stephan, executive director at New Era, said campuses often restrict voter registration drives conducted by students and by New Era organizers and volunteers.

“It happens in a variety of ways,” she said. “Where you can set up to register people, when you can register people, how far in advance you have to notify the campus that you’re planning to register people. They restrict how loud you can be, what kind of equipment you can bring – like tables, for example.”

The restrictions Stephan described sounded much like the kind of uneven and sometimes unpredictable or adjusted-on-the-fly restrictions that also vary from campus to campus that witnesses in favor of the bill had listed during the Senate committee hearing last week in which Neville’s bill won bipartisan unanimous support.

“If we’re talking about the right to free expression, it’s right to include voter registration activity,” said Sen. Andy Kerr, a Lakewood Democrat, during floor debate. “It’s a cornerstone of our democracy that folks get out and vote, and you can’t do that unless you’re registered.”

Why wait for the House to consider the idea, added Sen. Kerry Donovan, D-Vail.

“The sponsor acknowledged we should consider this in the House. We should fix it now,” she said.

Fenberg said he would have voted for the bill Friday if it had included the amendment.

Unspoken in the debate was the fact young voters tend to vote for Democratic political candidates, a fact that matters in a swing state like Colorado, especially one where the youth voting bloc is a significant and reliable electoral demographic.

The Senate discussion points to possible bumps in the road for a bill that has enjoyed surprise bipartisan support.

Neville’s bill taps into national debate that has seen conservative cable news figures clash with university students and administrators. Conservatives in recent years have argued that campuses have gone too far in attempting to combat societal bias and abuse by encouraging communication that lifts up members of university communities, including members of persecuted or marginalized minority groups, and discouraging communication that offends or degrades or fosters division.

Neville’s bill passed Friday’s second reading in the Senate. It will undergo one more reading in the upper chamber before it moves to the House.

The bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Steve Humphrey, told The Colorado Statesman on Wednesday that he was optimistic about the bill’s chances in the Democratic-controlled lower chamber.

“I think once people heard what the bill was really about, they were like, ‘Well, there are no bogey men in the bill.’ They found out it’s really about free speech and not restricting it to some postage stamp area in a corner of the campus, which I think we can all agree is a good idea.”

– john@coloradostatesman.com