Sitting in a conference room just off the Colorado Secretary of State’s offices, I was bemused by the cast of characters around me.
Two former Colorado Secretaries of State, a former Deputy Secretary, several of the best election lawyers around, the head of Colorado’s preeminent conservative advocacy group, a handful of well-traveled grassroots activists and a few designated proponents required to be in the room.
We were all there for an early April Title Board hearing, maybe the most important policy-setting venue very few Coloradans know about.
Any Colorado voter is familiar with the eventual product of Title Board hearings. Most of the questions that appear on the ballot after the list of candidates come through the Title Board. It is the clearinghouse for citizen-driven initiatives.
Under the Colorado constitution, citizens retain the right to draft and pass their own laws. While most state laws go through the General Assembly and the state senators and representatives we elect, the initiative process provides a path to direct democracy. Work through the process, get an initiative on the ballot and let the people decide.
Often, those are the most controversial subjects. Anything from the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, TABOR, passed in the 1990s to personhood initiatives rejected by voters on multiple occasions. This year initiatives regarding redistricting (which is why I was there), exclusionary transgender policies and voter identification initiatives have all been proposed.
There are also less high-profile initiatives like those to separate Pinnacol Assurance from the state or state financial and performance transparency. In fact, for the 2026 election there were 418 different proposals submitted. Many were variations on the same basic proposal and quite a few were withdrawn at some point in the submission-review-filing process. Less than half actually end up before the Title Board.
The Title Board’s job is more self-explanatory than most might imagine. They literally determine the language for the initiative title and what will describe it to voters on the ballot itself. There are a host of rules and requirements, but that is it in a nutshell.
Nominally the Colorado Attorney General, Secretary of State and the Director for the Office of Legislative Legal Services compose the Title Board. In practice it is instead always a designee for each who sits through these hearings. And the hearings can be loooonnnnng. Especially in April.
The Title Board generally meets twice per month starting right after an election. While initiatives can be submitted throughout the election cycle, most bunch up toward the end. Specifically, they bunch up in April of an election year.
Due to deadlines for initiative signature gathering and placement on the ballot, proposed initiatives must always receive a title by April or they will get left off the ballot and need to wait another two years.
For example, this year’s stack of initiatives must be reviewed by the Title Board by the end of their meeting on April 15 (and the deadline to submit for consideration at that hearing passed on Friday).
While the designees sitting on the Title Board can rotate out with someone else from their office, they will likely all be performing a marathon session that will stretch late into the night and likely into the following day or two. It is a grind most Coloradans should be happy to miss, but thankful for the people who make it happen.
But as interesting as the proposals are often the other folks in the room.
For example, Michael Fields showed up as the proponent for several measures. As head of Advance Colorado, Fields may not be well known to the Colorado electorate. But I would argue he is the most important conservative politician in the state.
For more than a decade Republicans have floundered and fallen out of power in elected offices. Statewide races for governor or attorney general will all be determined in the June Democratic primary; the winner will probably beat any Republican opponent by more than 10 points in November. Similarly the state Senate and state House have overwhelmingly Democratic majorities. That means Republicans have no policy power through normal channels.
Fields understood that the only route to adopting conservative policy positions had to go through the initiative process. More thoughtful and tempered than typical MAGA candidates and supporters, he recognized that policies dead on arrival under the golden dome could be pushed through the Title Board and put to the people directly.
He has courted large Republican donors, amassed a large war chest and has the money to follow through via signature gathering and campaigns.
Already this year he has put two initiatives on the ballot including one that requires local law enforcement to work with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.
That is precisely the type of policy that would never make it through committee in the legislature. And Fields and his allies have more coming. For example, former Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Taheri, who frequently represents Fields and appears as the other proponent designee for the DHS measure, is also listed for several proposed mail ballot voter identification initiatives. Those would adopt many of the policies President Donald Trump has pushed on a federal level.
While the state legislature continues to toil away at the Capitol, many of the biggest policy decisions are moving forward in a stuffy conference room a few blocks away. If they want to know what is happening in their state, Coloradans should pay a little closer attention.
Mario Nicolais is an attorney and columnist who writes on law enforcement, the legal system, health care and public policy. Follow him on BlueSky: @MarioNicolais.bsky.social.
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