(Photo/Nil, Flickr)

After a two day post-election limbo, Colorado’s Amendment 46 failed yesterday on a slim margin. The so-called Colorado Civil Rights Initiative is the first anti-affirmative-action amendment propped by California businessman Ward Connerly to make it onto a state ballot and flop.

The significance is not lost on Amendment 46′s detractors. “I am thrilled,” says Melissa Hart, a University of Colorado law professor who co-ran the Vote No on 46 campaign. “Given that everyone kept telling us we couldn’t do it, it is exciting that we did.”

Connerly’s amendments have a strong track record of winning easily once they make it onto the ballot. He passed three similar proposals in California, Michigan and Washington state in years past. But Connerly’s 2008 push to end race and gender preferences in five states this year — called the Super Tuesday for Equal Rights — was largely unsuccessful. In three states — Arizona, Missouri and Oklahoma — the proposal never made it to the ballot. In Colorado it was voted down. But it passed handily in Nebraska on Tuesday.

Hart says that she and others were aware of the difficulty of defeating the ballot amendment. Many voters, she says, found the language confusing and believed that they were upholding affirmative action rather than dismantling it.

“We would have preferred to not have it get on. It was important to us to fight every step of the way to keep the initiative out of our constitution,” she says. “The first step was to keep it off the ballot because past experience showed that once it was on the ballot it was going to be very hard to defeat.”

In September, the Vote No campaign filed suit against against Colorado Civil Rights Initiative organizers and Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, alleging that Amendment 46 petition circulators buoyed the measure with thousands of invalid signatures. But the group dropped its suit as the election grew near. They were also unsuccessful in putting a counter measure on the ballot.

And though Amendment 46 was mired in allegations that petition circulators misled Colorado voters into signing onto the amendment, the proposal polled extremely well in the weeks ahead of the election.

So what accounts for the historic outcome? Hart says that a well-connected network of volunteers and a “grassroots educational network” stopped the amendment.

“We didn’t have much in the way of financial resources. We did Spanish language TV ads and we did a couple of radio ads. But this was really a grassroots person-to-person educational effort. That made this campaign different from ‘no’ campaigns in other states. They were more focused on advertising in the past. We didn’t have the resources. We had to do it person-to-person.”

The Vote No group raised around $211,570 for its campaign, more than half of it since the end of September in big donations from the Colorado Progressive Coalition and two groups called Civic Participation Campaign, Inc. and Colorado Progressive Action. The Colorado Civil Rights Initiative was almost entirely funded by Ward Connerly’s two nonprofit organizations. He gave upward of $350,000 to the campaign.

Jessica Peck Corry, director of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, did not return a phone call and an e-mail seeking comment on Amendment 46.

But reached late yesterday afternoon, Connerly said that the amendment likely failed because Colorado voters were overwhelmed with the long ballot and voted no. He also said that people who supported Barack Obama, in particular young people, blacks and Latinos, likely voted against ending racial preferences.

Though Connerly has previously said he intends to move forward with his project to end affirmative action, he told the Colorado Independent that he is turning his focus to prison reform.

The measure, called Initiative 82, sought to preserve affirmative action programs in the face of Amendment 46, a controversial ballot proposal which, if passed, will destroy them.

Colorado University law professor Melissa Hart, who is also spearheading the Vote No on Amendment 46 campaign, claims that the Secretary of State’s Office tossed out signatures that belonged to registered active voters, including the signature of Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey’s son, according to 9News.

Hart and others also attempted to sue Amendment 46 backers for hiring out-of-state signature gatherers, which is illegal in Colorado. The suit also claimed that Amendment 46 garnered tens of thousands of invalid signatures. But Hart’s group dropped the suit last month and decided, instead, to focus on a vigorous Vote No on Amendment 46 campaign.

It appears, however, that Hart and other defenders of affirmative action have not given up on legal challenges entirely with this latest suit against the secretary of state.

(Illustration/Lyle Lahey, Flickr)

A campaign seeking to quash Colorado’s anti-affirmative-action ballot measure faces an onerous battle in the weeks ahead as the Nov. 4 election nears. The group behind the campaign hopes to convince voters to reject the ballot initiative, which will dismantle affirmative action programs if passed. But a series of failed legal challenges have left organizers with little cash as they scramble to put together a cogent countercampaign.

The anti-affirmative-action measure, Amendment 46, is part of what was originally a five-state effort this year in Colorado, Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma to end preferential treatment for women and minorities in public employment, contracting and education. Orchestrated by California businessman Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative-action thrust failed to catch on in all but two states — Colorado and Nebraska. In the rest, petition circulators did not gather enough valid signatures to place it on the ballot, or, in the case of Arizona, state officials found irregularities in the signatures and struck it from the ballot. Similar Connerly-organized campaigns to limit affirmative action have previously passed in California, Michigan, and Washington state.

Vote No on Amendment 46, along with a group called Colorado Unity, also hoped to strip the so-called Colorado Civil Rights Initiative from the ballot by contesting the validity of tens of thousands of signatures gathered by Connerly’s paid circulators. But on Wednesday organizers opted to drop their lawsuit to do just that.

“Our time and energy are better spent elsewhere,” says Melissa Hart, a law professor at the University of Colorado who is spearheading the Vote No on Amendment 46 campaign. She and several others attempted to sue Amendment 46 organizers and Secretary of State Mike Coffman. She claims that petition circulators gathered thousands of fake or irregular signatures, and that between seven and 10 circulators were brought in from out of state. In Colorado it is illegal for out-of-staters to collect signatures for a citizens’ initiative.

“We looked around at the names and addresses” of the circulators, Hart says, “and it was easy to see that they no longer lived at the addresses. We spoke with a landlord who said that one person only lived there for a couple of months. There were other similar examples where this person just appeared and planned to leave. You don’t count as a citizen unless you are planning to stay.”

In July a district court judge ruled that Hart and her team would have to air their out-of-state circulator complaint with an administrative law judge instead. But rather than pursue continued litigation, they decided on Wednesday to kill the suit altogether.

“We felt that the judge’s ruling put us in a bad position; going through litigation is difficult, and those difficulties did not warrant us continuing this suit,” says Hart.

This is the second blow for the Vote No campaign this month. Organizers had also launched a counterinitiative, known as Amendment 82, which aimed to defend the state’s affirmative action programs in the case that Amendment 46 passes. But two weeks ago the secretary of state found that Amendment 82 did not garner sufficient signatures to make it onto the ballot. Hart says that her group may contest that decision. But for now they will focus on educating voters about the dangers of Connerly’s initiative.

“We are going to run the best campaign we can given limited time,” she says. “What I have seen over the course of the past few months is that the key to defeating Connerly’s deceptive language is talking to people and helping them hear what it actually does. What is so disconcerting to me about Amendment 46 is that it is so misleading.”

Connerly’s five-state effort, dubbed “Super Tuesday for Equal Rights,” has come under fire for its innocuous wording, which, opponents claim, makes people think they are signing on to defend affirmative action rather than destroy it.

But Hart and other organizers will have to scramble to battle the Connerly machine. According to campaign finance records, Vote No on Amendment 46 has raised $87,655 so far. And more than $39,000 of that was spent on lawyer fees.

Hart says that she doesn’t regret focusing on the lawsuit and that the group plans to raise and spend another several hundred thousand dollars before election day on yard signs, mailers and radio spots to defeat Amendment 46.

“What has become clear to me and what all the experts said months ago was you can spend the money you want right now, but nobody is going to be listening to you until after the Democratic National Convention and after we know what the ballot looks like. People weren’t focusing on the ballot. Now they are. And we are going to get them focused on 46.”

Meanwhile the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative has raised a whopping $343,280. Around $308,400 of that came from two of Connerly’s Sacramento, Calif.-based organizations: Super Tuesday for Equal Rights and the American Civil Rights Coalition.

Jessica Peck Corry, executive director of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative and a policy analyst with the conservative Independence Institute think tank in Golden, says she doesn’t yet know what her group will spend on an advertising campaign. The group’s attorney, Scott Gessler, did not return a phone call seeking comment about how much the group has spent on legal fees. Campaign finance reports show a one-time $5,000 payment to Gessler’s firm.

“They have left us with substantial legal bills,” Corry says of the Vote No campaign. “That takes our energy and resources away from focusing on a voter education drive. And that is unfortunate.”

For more on Amendment 46 and Ward Connerly’s Colorado campaign, please take a look at our extensive past coverage.

Launched by a group called Coloradans for Equal Opportunity, the proposal would have protected certain affirmative action programs in the face of another ballot initiative, Amendment 46, which seeks to dismantle some of them. Amendment 46 is part of a national campaign spearheaded by anti-affirmative action guru Ward Connerly, a California businessman.

Melissa Hart, president of Coloradans for Equal Opportunity, told the Denver Post that legal battles between the two groups left her organization minimal time to collect signatures.

“Obviously we’re disappointed,” she said.