What if Colorado's hardest problems
were solved by Colorado's own wisdom—
not by moneyed politicians and two parties at war?

A citizen assembly is a group of randomly selected residents — drawn from across the state, matched to its demographic and geographic makeup — who are brought together to work on a specific public question. They hear from experts and people with lived experience, deliberate in small groups, and produce a concrete policy proposal.

This model is designed so the assembly's proposal has teeth: it goes to the legislature for a required yes-or-no vote. If the legislature declines or doesn't act within the required window, the proposal goes directly to Colorado voters on the next general election ballot. Citizens always have the final word.

Yes. The selection lottery is stratified by geography — rural, suburban, and urban Colorado are all represented in proportion to their actual population. The same applies to party registration, age, gender, and race.

This is a structural requirement built into the initiative, not a best-effort aspiration. A Front Range–dominated assembly would not reflect Colorado, and the design prevents that.

Members are also compensated for their time, and childcare and travel costs are covered. Serving shouldn't require the flexibility to take unpaid leave from a job or the funds to drive to Denver on your own.

Neither — and that's part of the point. The method doesn't produce a liberal or conservative outcome; it produces a considered one.

France's Citizens' Convention on Climate (2020), for example, produced 149 proposals spanning the political spectrum — market-based mechanisms alongside regulation, worker support alongside emissions targets — because the 150 randomly selected participants arrived with varied politics and had to find solutions that held up under real scrutiny from people who disagreed with them.

Ireland's Citizens' Assembly on abortion rights included members with strong views on both sides. The process is designed so no faction can stack it — not organized by parties, not funded by advocacy groups, not tilted by whoever shows up to public comment.

It's not that ordinary citizens are smarter — it's that they're working under different conditions. Assembly members don't have donors to reward, party discipline to maintain, or a future campaign to protect. Their only task is to reach a decision they can defend to the people sitting next to them.

The process also creates conditions that elected chambers rarely have: weeks of deliberation, expert testimony chosen by the participants themselves, and small-group discussion across partisan lines. Misinformation that spreads easily in a cable news environment doesn't survive a room of 150 people asking it hard questions directly.

Thirty years of research on deliberative assemblies across two dozen countries consistently finds the same pattern: participants arrive with strongly held views and leave with positions that are more nuanced, more fact-grounded, and more broadly supported — not because anyone told them what to think, but because they spent real time examining the evidence alongside people who disagreed with them.

That's exactly the right question, and the initiative is designed with it in mind. Rather than concentrating authority in one place that can be captured, it distributes control across several independently selected citizen panels:

• A Rules Assembly — chosen separately — designs the ground rules for each cycle. It is explicitly prohibited from considering likely policy outcomes. No politician or party sets the process.
• A Topic Assembly — chosen separately — selects the policy question from public nominations. They cannot consider which outcomes a particular topic would favor.
• Hard anti-lobbying protections: members cannot accept anything of value from anyone with a stake in the outcome. Private outreach must be reported within 48 hours and becomes public record.
• Full transparency: all proceedings, testimony, deliberations, and votes are recorded and public. The selection algorithm is open-source and auditable before each cycle.

A process that distributes authority across multiple independently selected panels — with everything on the public record — is far harder to capture than a single legislature that answers to donors.

Most citizen assemblies have been advisory — recommendations handed to elected officials who then do what they were going to do anyway. This one is specifically designed to close that gap.

The Colorado model gives the assembly a guaranteed path to the ballot. The legislature cannot sit on the proposal, delay it indefinitely, or quietly kill it in committee. If they don't vote yes, the question goes directly to Colorado voters at the next general election. There is no version of "ignore it."

The assembly is funded from the existing state legislative budget — the same pool that currently funds legislators and their staff. No new taxes required. The initiative also includes an optional donation channel on the state tax return for those who want to contribute beyond the base funding.

Citizen assemblies have been run in dozens of countries over the past 20 years. A few clear examples:

• Ireland — ran assemblies on abortion rights, climate change, and electoral reform. The abortion assembly's recommendations led directly to a successful constitutional referendum in 2018.
• France — 150 randomly selected citizens spent nine months on climate policy in 2020, producing proposals that crossed the political spectrum.
• Iceland — 1,000 randomly selected citizens set national priorities after the 2008 financial crisis, directly informing a constitutional revision.
• Petaluma and Culver City, CA — smaller-scale local assemblies have already been run in California, establishing precedent for the US context.

Most of those assemblies were advisory. The Colorado model is designed to have real teeth — a required legislative vote and an automatic path to the ballot.