Colorado's Supreme Court ruled on Friday, October 30, that votes cast on Amendment 87 — the proposed constitutional amendment that would replace the state's flat income tax with a graduated one — shall be counted, rejecting a last-minute legal challenge that sought to knock the measure off the November 3 ballot altogether. The seven-member court issued a short, 47-word order that did not explain its reasoning, upheld the Denver District Court ruling that had already dismissed the case, and said a full opinion will follow in due course. The decision ends the court fight this site reported when the appeal reached the high court earlier in the case: with four days left before Election Day, the question now belongs entirely to Colorado voters.
Source: Colorado Public Radio, Oct. 30, 2026
The order's operative sentence is one line: “Votes cast on Initiative 2025-2026 # 195 (also known as “Amendment 87”) shall be counted,” the court stated, adding: “The Court will issue an opinion in due course.” Bloomberg Law reported the same ruling on Friday: the justices ordered that votes be counted on the proposed graduated-tax amendment and rejected the petition alleging the initiative never should have made it onto the ballot. A trial court had already rejected the attempt to remove Amendment 87 from the ballot on October 21.
Source: Bloomberg Law, Oct. 30, 2026
What Amendment 87 would change
Colorado is one of a small group of states that tax income at a single flat rate — currently 4.4% for both individuals and businesses. Amendment 87 would amend the state constitution to replace that flat tax with a graduated system, in which the rate rises with income. According to the measure's terms as reported by Colorado Public Radio, people and businesses with annual income below about $500,000 would see their state income taxes drop, while taxes would go up on incomes above that half-million-dollar line. Supporters, organised as the coalition Protect Colorado's Future, argue the change would make state income taxes fairer and raise billions of dollars in new revenue at a moment when Colorado, like other states, faces deep federal cuts to social programmes. Opponents counter that it would hurt the state's economy and small businesses and amounts to what they call a $2.7 billion blank check to the legislature, which Democrats have controlled in recent years. The measure has been one of the most consequential and contentious on Colorado's fall ballot, spawning heavy television, mail and social-media advertising from both sides.
Source: Colorado Public Radio, Oct. 30, 2026
The lawsuit: 66 allegedly unregistered signature gatherers
The challenge was filed earlier this month by Michael A. Hancock of Arapahoe County — an opponent of the graduated tax who, CPR noted, is no relation to Denver's former mayor of the same name. His lawsuit claimed that dozens of paid signature gatherers, called circulators, working with the coalition behind Amendment 87 failed to follow state registration rules, and that Secretary of State Jena Griswold's office compounded the problem by never checking circulator registrations before the suit was filed — which, his lawyers argued, violated a provision of state law aimed at preventing fraud. In their answer brief, Hancock's attorneys — led by Jason R. Dunn, a former Colorado deputy attorney general and U.S. attorney with the Denver firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck — wrote that backers “failed to ensure that at least 66 of their 311 paid circulators were registered” as the law requires, and that the unregistered circulators collected enough signatures to drop the measure “below the constitutional signature threshold” if those signatures were thrown out. More than 124,000 signatures were required to put a proposal on the ballot.
Source: Colorado Public Radio, Oct. 30, 2026 (answer briefs)
The other side answered that throwing out signatures was the wrong remedy for registration mistakes. Martha M. Tierney of the Denver firm Tierney Lawrence Stiles, for the measure's backers, argued that the right of initiative is a fundamental right in Colorado, that the process should be “liberally construed” and “not hampered” by technicalities, that backers substantially complied with the requirements in good faith, and that a petition entity that fails to register circulators can be fined or have its licence suspended — but “invalidation of petition signatures is not a proper remedy.” Attorneys for the Secretary of State's office, from Attorney General Phil Weiser's office, added that Hancock did not dispute the validity of the signatures themselves — “including the signatures of notaries, circulators, and the 130,938 voters across the state who support putting the proposal to a vote” — and that removing the measure would take the question “out of the hands of Colorado voters based on technical licensure violations.” The Denver District Court judge who first heard the case dismissed it, holding that state law does not let the elections office block a proposal from the ballot over registration issues with signature gatherers; opening briefs reached the Supreme Court on Monday and answer briefs on Wednesday, and on Friday the court ruled.
Source: Colorado Public Radio, Oct. 30, 2026
Amendment 87 is a live test of two American arguments at once: whether a flat tax is fairer because everyone pays the same rate, or whether higher earners should pay a higher share — and whether technical errors by paid petition workers should be able to cancel a vote that more than 130,000 people signed to hold. For Colorado's small-business owners, including trucking and shop-owning families in the state's growing South Asian communities, the measure is not abstract: under its terms, incomes below about $500,000 would be taxed less and incomes above it more, for businesses as well as individuals. Whatever voters decide on November 3 will now be decided at the ballot box, not in a courtroom.
What the winners and the challenger said
“Twice now, Colorado courts have said that more than 130,000 voters who signed this petition deserve to have their signatures count, and that Coloradans deserve to decide this question for themselves,” said Chris deGruy Kennedy, co-chair of Protect Colorado's Future and president of the Bell Policy Center — while acknowledging what he called administrative oversights by the campaign. “Justice prevailed. More than a million voters have cast their ballots while this case moved through the courts, and today's ruling means their votes on Amendment 87 will count,” said Kiyana Newell, an Amendment 87 proponent and policy and research director at New Era Colorado. Dunn, for the challenger, was dissatisfied: “The result is disappointing as it leaves a system in which there will be little accountability for those who collect signatures and fail to follow the rules,” he said.
Source: Statements via Colorado Public Radio, Oct. 30, 2026
What happens next
Amendment 87 remains on the ballot for the Tuesday, November 3 election, and every vote cast on it — including the more than a million ballots Newell said were already cast while the case moved through the courts — will be counted. If voters approve it, Colorado's constitution will be amended to replace the 4.4% flat tax with the graduated structure; if they reject it, the flat tax stays. The Supreme Court's full opinion, explaining the legal reasoning the 47-word order did not, is still to come “in due course,” and it will govern how future signature-gathering disputes are handled in Colorado. Griswold, the Secretary of State whose office defended the measure's place on the ballot, is a Democrat running for Attorney General; Weiser, whose office supplied her lawyers, is running for governor — so the case's afterlife will run alongside the same election it almost changed.