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bluedigger

(17,087 posts)
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 06:14 PM Aug 2012

Personhood Initiative Fails To Get On Ballot

Source: TheDenverChannel.com

DENVER -- The so-called "personhood" amendment fell short of the number of signatures required to appear on the November ballot, the Secretary of State announced Wednesday.
Of the 106,119 signatures submitted on Aug. 6, the Secretary of State’s office says staff verified 82,246. A total of 86,000 verified signatures are required to appear on the ballot, so the proposed initiative fell 3,859 signatures short
Initiative 46, or the “Application of the Term of Person,” was supported by the Personhood Colorado group.
Sec. of State Scott Gessler's office said signature checkers lost a section of the petition containing 20 signatures but counted them as valid anyway.

Read more: http://www.thedenverchannel.com/politics/31395300/detail.html



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Grave Grumbler

(160 posts)
1. They can still get it on the ballot if they get more signatures in time.
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 06:22 PM
Aug 2012

As per the linked story:

This is the first time supporters failed to get the proposal on the ballot on their first try. They can still try again to collect more signatures in order to win a place on the ballot.

bluedigger

(17,087 posts)
2. Hey, it's a battle won, not the war.
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 06:25 PM
Aug 2012

Given their fail rate of around 20%, they better come up with an additional 5,000 signatures, pronto.

marble falls

(57,172 posts)
3. What's this, like the fouth or fifth time in the last six years and it failed again.......
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 08:35 PM
Aug 2012

The country is not right winged and I believe that the results of this election will mirror LBJ/Goldwater election in '64. The President will get a Democratic House, too.

bluedigger

(17,087 posts)
4. It's been on the ballot twice I think.
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 09:11 PM
Aug 2012

From the link in the OP: "Similar abortion bans on Colorado ballots in 2010 and 2008 elections failed. The measure has steadily lost momentum since 2008. Each year, fewer people have signed the petition to put the measure on the ballot, and Coloradans have voted against it by three-to-one margins."

Archae

(46,344 posts)
5. Twice in Colorado, failed both times, was on Mississippi ballot once. Failed there too.
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 09:23 PM
Aug 2012

Think it just MIGHT sink in to those cementheads one of these days, these bills are pure bullshit?

bluedigger

(17,087 posts)
6. I don't think they give a rat's ass.
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 09:30 PM
Aug 2012

They are just to energize the base and get the one issue voters to the polls.

SWTORFanatic

(385 posts)
8. Neither. I think they just want this to pass. They've been fighting
Wed Aug 29, 2012, 09:35 PM
Aug 2012

Roe v Wade since 7 years before I was born.

It's like putting a high school kid up against a major league pitcher. 99% of the time he'll miss, but 1% he'll actually make contact. And then they think it will be a mandate and a law forever.

marble falls

(57,172 posts)
10. Rand Paul Fetal Personhood Amendment Stalls Flood Insurance Bill (UPDATE)...
Thu Aug 30, 2012, 08:12 AM
Aug 2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/rand-paul-fetal-personhood-flood-insurance_n_1628128.html

A similar measure has been defeated twice, by large margins, in Colorado. But the national campaign, promoted by Personhood USA, a Colorado-based group, found more receptive ground in Mississippi, where anti-abortion sentiment crosses party and racial lines, and where the state already has so many restrictions on abortion that only one clinic performs the procedure.

In 2009, an ardent abortion foe named Les Riley formed a state personhood group and started collecting the signatures needed to reach the ballot. Evangelicals and other longtime abortion opponents have pressed the case, and Proposition 26 has the support of a range of political leaders. Its passage could energize similar drives brewing in Florida, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin and other states.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/personhood-amendments-would-ban-nearly-all-abortions.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all


Personhood Amendments: Coming to a Ballot Near You? (Map)
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/personhood-amendments-state-map
—By Kate Sheppard
| Tue Nov. 8, 2011 4:00 AM PST



On Tuesday, Mississippi asked voters to decide whether or not to ban all abortions and many forms of contraception. The voters said no. But if anti-abortion groups get their way, there will be a host of similar measures on the ballot in 2012.

Efforts are underway in at least six states to adopt similar laws via constitutional amendments, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America, which is tracking the initiatives. The specific language varies from state to state, but all of the measures seek to redefine human life as beginning at conception. (And as my colleague Nick Baumann reports today, federal lawmakers are also circulating similar measures.)


The group California Civil Rights Foundation is trying to get an amendment on the 2012 ballot defining a "person" as "all living human beings from beginning of biological development as human organism." In Florida, the anti-abortion advocates at American Life League and Personhood USA have launched a signature-gathering effort for a similar initiative that would grant rights starting at "the beginning of the biological development of that human being." The Montana ProLife Coalition is also gathering signatures for a ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to define "person" to encompass "the stage of fertilization or conception."

The Nevada Pro-life Coalition, meanwhile, has taken a slightly different tack that would nevertheless achieve the same end, with an effort to outlaw "the intentional taking of a prenatal person's life" via an amendment to the state constitution. The measure would guarantee the "unalienable right to life" of "every human being at all stages of biological development before birth."

In Ohio, the state's attorney general rejected an effort to get a personhood measure on the ballot in 2011, because he felt the summary of the measure offered by anti-abortion activists was not "fair and truthful." The activists have already pledged to try again for 2012 election. Similarly, the Oregon Human Life Amendment Committee tried to get a measure on the ballot for 2010 that would guarantee protection for "all human beings…including their unborn offspring at every state of their biological development, including fertilization." The measure got tied up in litigation, but anti-abortion advocates are trying again for 2012.

An anti-abortion activist in Alaska attempted to get a personhood measure on the ballot for 2011, one that stated that "the natural right to life and body of the unborn child supercedes [sic] the statutory right of the mother to consent to the injury or death of her unborn child." But the state's attorney general rejected it, finding that the language was "clearly unconstitutional." In Colorado, voters rejected a ballot measure to define human life starting "at the beginning of biological development" in 2010 by a 3 to 1 margin. Voters there also rejected a similar effort in 2008.

Map produced by Tasneem Raja
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