The bill that would have restricted who could run as a candidate to replace a recalled official, and which raised questions of constitutionality, won a bipartisan vote in the House Thursday, but only after major changes.

As introduced, House Bill 1185 would limit who can run as a candidate to replace a recalled official, if the election is for a partisan seat. Under the measure as introduced, only a person from the same party could be a candidate for a recalled seat.

If a seat is held by an unaffiliated official who is recalled, the candidate for that seat would also have to be unaffiliated under the bill.

The measure, which also dealt with municipal elections, was seen by critics as a preemptive strike, should gun rights groups decide to launch recalls of Democrats supporting the gun control bills currently working their way through the General Assembly. 

In 2013, two Senate Democrats, including then-President John Morse of Colorado Springs, were recalled because of votes on gun control measures. Morse and then-Sen. Angela Giron of Pueblo were recalled and then replaced by Republican candidates. 

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, recalls were first established by a municipality in 1903 and in Oregon and Michigan in 1908.

Initially, recalls were set up to allow voters to remove an elected official who was either incompetent or unresponsive, but over the past 15 years in Colorado recalls have been launched more around how an elected official votes on an issue.

But limiting the candidates who could run to replace a recalled official in a partisan election, as was initially proposed in HB 1185, raised concerns around constitutionality. Colorado GOP chair Kristi Burton Brown told Colorado Politics that the bill was “the Democrats way of preventing citizens from speaking through a recall. The point of a recall is to allow a new person to represent them, and sometimes that’s a person of a different political party.”

The bill has a second section dealing with municipal elections and what happens when so many members of a city or town council resign that it becomes challenging to figure out who can call an election.

This is the situation in Walsenburg, where the entire city council and mayor are facing a recall, which if successful could leave the town without any means to appoint replacements. In Florence, the entire city council resigned a year ago over allegations of corruption, leaving only the mayor and questions about how to replace those six council members.

HB 1185 would allow the city or town clerk to call an election in the absence of a quorum.

But it’s the bill’s language over recalls of partisan elected officials that got the bill into trouble. Initially, the bill had a Republican co-sponsor, Rep. Don Wilson of Monument, who previously served as mayor of Monument. But the language over restrictions on who could run in a recall election caused him to drop off.

The solution? Strike, in its entirety, the section on partisan recall elections, an amendment offered by Wilson and supported by prime sponsor Rep. Lindsey Daugherty, D-Arvada.

Wilson said this week that the bill’s original intent was around the issues at the municipal level. He didn’t feel the section on partisan recalls fit well within the bill. What was added was not going to be beneficial to anyone, and Wilson said that was an opinion shared on both sides of the aisle. 

Daugherty told Colorado Politics her intention in including the recall language was to take politics out of the recall process. 

“When you’re talking about recalls, a recall should be about the ethics of a person, someone in office…doing something so they can’t represent the people,” she said. “It shouldn’t be about another party. That would take the politics out of recall and left to the majority of the voters to decide.”

However, Daugherty, an attorney, said she also looked at state case law, which also raised concerns for her. “It’s important not to pass legislation that could be struck down” by the state Supreme Court, she added.

HB 1185 won a 48 to 14 vote on Wednesday, including “yes” votes from Wilson and five other Republicans. It now heads to the Senate.