The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday that U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn does not have enough signatures to appear on the GOP primary ballot.
This "expedited decision" comes 13 days after a district judge ruled Lamborn had more than 1,000 valid signatures needed to remain on the ballot. In that initial decision, District Court Judge Brian Whitney threw out around 58 signatures from just one petition circulator. The plaintiff’s appealed that initial ruling.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that another circulator’s signatures were not valid, because he did not live in Colorado. The earlier decision from the district judge ruled the circulator in question, Ryan Tipple, had just relocated to Colorado before taking a job with Kennedy Enterprises, the company Lamborn used to gather the signatures.
District Court Judge Whitney said he believed that Tipple intended to live here at the time that he took the job with Kennedy. Mr. Tipple had collected 269 signatures for the Lamborn campaign. According to the Secretary of State Office’s, the Lamborn campaign obtained 1,269 valid signatures.
The supreme court’s ruling threw those signatures out, putting him below the 1,000 minimum signatures required to appear on the ballot, along with the previous 58 signatures that were thrown out earlier.
The decision comes several weeks after five voters from the 5th Congressional District filed suit against the Lamborn Campaign and Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams alleging some of those signatures were invalid. State election law has residency requirements for petition circulators.
When we reached out to Rep. Lamborn’s office, they did not comment.
Lamborn was first elected in 2006 and has served six terms as the Congressional Representative for one of Colorado’s most reliably Republican-voting districts. No Democrat has ever been elected since the district’s formation in 1972. Lamborn last faced a primary election in 2008.
The Colorado primary election is set to take place on June 26.
