Thirty Years Ago This Week: “Where’s the beef?” asked Terrance Gillespie of the Colorado Attorney General’s Special Prosecutions Unit, after reviewing charges filed by Democratic Party candidate for secretary of state Sherrie Wolf against Republican candidate Vikki Buckley.

Wolf accused Buckley of election fraud, claiming she had failed to identify who had paid for a campaign fundraising letter. Wolf added that Buckley had raised funds illegally, intimating that Buckley was not following the letter of the law, which the secretary of state’s office is sworn to uphold.

But the attorney general’s office later ruled that the fundraising letter that Wolf submitted was clearly identified as from the “Vikki Buckley for Secretary of State” campaign and further that all of the required committee members and co-chairs of the committee had been identified on the mailing list.

“While we often get complaints of a technical nature where the candidate is trying to observe the spirit of the law, your complaint is not even close,” Gillespie wrote in response to Wolf’s complaint. “This office would be laughed out of the court if we filed the charges on the basis of no evidence or colorable claim.”

For over twenty years Buckley had served as second-in-command of the secretary of state’s elections office.

Buckley responded to Wolf’s attack, “Anyone running for Secretary of State ought to know that a law dealing with anonymous statements concerning candidates and fraudulent statements doesn’t apply in this case because state law doesn’t require the name of committee members on campaign literature and no fraudulent claims were made.”

Twenty Years Ago: Coloradans rejected, by a resounding majority, Amendment 36 which would have shifted Colorado’s electoral vote system from an ‘all-or-nothing’ method into a proportional structure. The proportional structure would have divided up Colorado’s nine electoral votes according to how much of the popular vote each of the candidates had won.

“They tried to tell the people of Colorado we had a problem and really tried to generate a problem,” said Kathie Finger, co-founder of Coloradans Against a Really Stupid Idea, the organization formed in opposition to Amendment 36. “You’ll have a tough time selling voters a cure when we didn’t even know we were sick.”

Supporters of Amendment 36 said they believed that outside factors were largely to blame for the failure of the amendment.

“The presidential election was perceived to be much closer here,” Julie Brown, campaign director for Make Your Vote Count, said. “There were a lot of defections from the Democrats, hoping to get nine electoral votes for Kerry. Governor (Bill) Owens was effective at scaring the hell out of people. When he said Colorado will be another Florida it made people nervous.”

The Amendment 36 campaign did receive a large infusion of cash from California businessman J. Jorge Klor de Alva, totaling more than one million dollars. Regardless, however well-funded the campaign was, legal experts predicted that several court cases would challenge the amendment’s constitutionality and local newspaper editorial boards across the state had spoken out against the amendment.

Even President George W. Bush and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had united in opposition to Amendment 36.

Both groups were surprised at the nationwide attention Amendment 36 garnered.

“We started a national discussion on electoral reform,” Brown said. “It even got some attention in Europe. I was thinking, ‘This is just a little state initiative.’ Now these kind of voting irregularities are starting to hit the mainstream press. We will get electoral reform in this country. The process will just take time.

Rachael Wright is the author of several novels including The Twins of Strathnaver, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Colorado Springs Gazette.