Fort Collins, Colorado City Council Votes to Ban Write-in Candidates for City Office

Posted on by February 20, 2025

On February 19, the city council of Fort Collins, Colorado, voted to ban write-in candidates in city elections.

In 1912, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that all ballots must allow write-ins. Littlejohn v People ex rel Desch, 121 P.159, held unconstitutional a Colorado law that banned write-ins in school director elections. The court said, “Every qualified elector shall have an equal right to cast a ballot for the person of his own selection, and that no act shall be done by any power, civil or military, to prevent it. Such is the mandate and spirit of the Constitution (meaning state constitution), and it thereby vests in the elector a constitutional right of which he cannot lawfully be deprived by any governmental power.”

Comments

Fort Collins, Colorado City Council Votes to Ban Write-in Candidates for City Office — 22 Comments

  1. The expressed concern in Fort Collins was that a write-in candidate might be elected, and then not be eligible to serve. This happened in a nearby town where a mayor or city council member was removed because they exceeded term limits. But that was because of ambiguity in the term limits in the city charter – whether they applied to full or partial terms. The city clerk had placed the candidate on the ballot based on one interpretation, which a court subsequently overturned.

    In Fort Collins an elected official must be nominated. Nomination requires a petition with 25 signatures. A court could conceivably rule that a write-in recipient of the most votes was “not nominated”.

    I suspect that the real concern in Fort Collins is that the next city election will be by RCV, and write-in votes make it messy. If there is a constitutional right to vote for one write-in candidate, then there is no basis for restricting a voter from ranking dozens or hundreds of write-in candidates.

    Simpler solutions in Fort Collins would have been to eliminate the requirement for “nomination” from the charter.

    Write-in candidates can be required to file a declaration of write-in candidacy, and they can be screened for ineligibility. There certainly is no constitutional right to vote for a non-person or an ineligible person such as non-resident, felon, under age, etc. person. If in the worst case, an ineligible person receives the most votes, it simply creates a vacancy in office.

  2. Any state military court-martial in the olde fort in Fort Collins to try and convict the city council hacks of treason against the state const ???

    local offices left out of 14-2 amdt

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