2026 Ballot - Follow the Money

Every committee campaigning for or against a Colorado ballot measure has to report its contributions and its spending to the Secretary of State, and those reports are public. Hardly anyone reads them, which is a shame, because they answer the most useful question you can ask about a ballot fight: who wants this badly enough to pay for it? So I downloaded the files and added them up. (An auditor never really retires; he just finds new ledgers.)

The short answer: a large share of the money trying to change Colorado's constitution and laws this year doesn't come from Colorado. That's true on both sides, but it's much more true on one of them.

How I sorted it

A yes or no vote doesn't line up neatly with politics. On some measures yes is the conservative position, and on others it's the progressive one. So instead of counting yes money against no money, I put each committee on the left-leaning or right-leaning side of its measure. Where yes is the right-leaning side, or yes is the left, the table says so.

The numbers come from TRACER, the state's campaign finance system, as of the morning of October 10. They cover reports through the September 30 period (filed October 6), plus the large-contribution reports filed since. A few judgment calls are worth knowing about:

• Umbrella committees. Several committees are registered on more than one measure. Brighter Colorado is on eight and Vote Common Sense is on nine, for example. Their filings don't say which measure the money went to, so I split it evenly. That's an estimate, and it's why several right-side numbers in the table are identical.
• No double counting. Real Safety Solutions gave $50,000 to Vote Common Sense, so I took that $50,000 out of one side of the ledger.
• Out of state means the donor's filed address. One exception: $2.2 million to the Amendment 84 committee from the Coalition for American Prosperity & Growth uses a Colorado Springs mail-forwarding address, but Governing reports the group is based in Ohio and it isn't registered in Colorado, so I counted it as out of state.
• Pass-throughs count where they're based. National groups with DC addresses count as out of state. Colorado groups like Conservation Colorado, Cobalt, CFCPE, and Ready Colorado count as in state, even where their own money comes from national donors.
• Not included: nonprofits spending outside the issue committees. Colorado Dawn ($750,000) and A Common Sense America ($625,000) paid for Amendment 82 signature gathering directly, and none of that shows up here.

The short version

Measure by measure

Spending is what each side has actually spent so far. The out-of-state columns show how much of each side's raised money came from outside Colorado, and what share of the total that is, which is why out-of-state dollars can be bigger than spending.

A few things jump out. Amendment 84, the mail-ballot ID measure, is the single biggest right-side campaign, and every dollar of it traces to out-of-state donors. Proposition NN, the K-12 and TABOR measure, is the biggest left-side campaign, and most of its money came from one national union. And on Amendments 81 and 85 and Propositions 132 and 136, nearly all the right-side money is the evenly split umbrella spending, almost entirely from outside the state.

Who's writing the big checks

Left-leaning side

• National Education Association: $3.0 million (Proposition NN)
• Utility Action Alliance: $600,000
• Sixteen Thirty Fund: $500,000
• Schusterman: $500,000 (Proposition 132)
• ACLU national: about $396,000 (Propositions 134 and 135)
• League of Conservation Voters: $250,000 (Amendment 82)
• Green Advocacy Project: $200,000 (Vote Common Sense)

Right-leaning side

• Coalition for American Prosperity & Growth: $2.2 million (Amendment 84)
• Common Sense America: $2.0 million, and GOPAC: $500,000 (both to Brighter Colorado)
• T. Roosevelt Conservation Alliance, based in Wisconsin: $1.56 million (Amendment 83)
• A Public Voice: $1 million, and American Jobs & Growth Fund: $1 million (both Amendment 84)
• American Prosperity Coalition, based in Texas: $760,000
• American Revival PAC: $250,000 (Amendment 86)
• Americans for Prosperity, national: $235,000

Money still in the bank

Ballots go out this month, and several committees have real money left to spend between now and November 3. As of their latest reports, raised minus spent:

• Families Not Politics: about $1.25 million
• Colorado Voter Trust: about $850,000
• Yes for Colorado Kids: about $743,000
• Coloradans for CoCo: about $647,000
• No Pollution in the Constitution: about $600,000
• Protect Colorado's Future: about $570,000
• Vote Common Sense: about $554,000, per its September 30 report
• Defend Our Ballots: $171,000, and it hasn't spent any of it yet

Expect your mailbox to get busier.

Two things that don't add up

• Energy Freedom Alliance of the Rockies reported $90,000 in spending (texts and mail from a Virginia consulting firm) against $0 raised and no loans. Either a contribution hasn't been reported or that spending is unpaid debt. Neither is great.
• Coloradans for a Level Playing Field, the Democratic redistricting committee whose measure didn't make the ballot, raised $4.1 million anyway. 99.9% of it came from out of state.

What this can and can't tell you

Out-of-state money doesn't make a measure good or bad. Plenty of national groups fund causes their Colorado members care about, and a measure deserves to be judged on what it does. That said, when an ad tells you what "Colorado families" want, it's worth knowing whether Colorado families paid for the ad.

The numbers also have limits. The umbrella splits are estimates. Colorado groups that are funded nationally count as in state here, so the true out-of-state share is, if anything, higher than shown. Nonprofits that spend outside the issue committees don't appear at all. And these are snapshots: the October reports will move every figure in the table.

What I'm asking

This isn't an endorsement list, and I'm not going to tell you how to vote on any of these measures. What I am asking is that you read past the ads. The state's Blue Book lays out the arguments for and against each one, and TRACER will show you who's paying for any committee you're curious about. Then get your ballot back: drop boxes are open around the clock, and ballots have to be received by 7 p.m. on November 3.

And while you're filling it out, the city council race is on there too. I've written about how I'd vote that part.