That said, nearly a million people voted No, and for that we thank you all very much. More people voted yes, but with $7 million spent as compared to no money spent on our side, well, it’s good that it got as much opposition as it did.

We’ll leave this contact form up for a little while. If you have anything else we should know about, please drop us a line. We’ve gotten a stack of very nice notes already, thanks much to each of you.

And by the way, if you are one of the pompous poker players who wants to write in just to gloat and make personal insults about the people on the “no” side, well, several of your brothers have beaten you to it, so you can save yourself the time. If you must write in, please use a dictionary. Who knew that gambler/blog trolls were also practically illiterate?

Colorado now joins the states that have high-stakes gambling. While this will create state revenue for one worthy recipient, state community colleges, this benefit does not come without a high price. We encourage the Colorado legislature and all Colorado citizens to carefully monitor the casino corporations to check the  negative impacts expanded gambling will have on our state.

A lot of you are doing some last-minute research before you head to the polls. Thanks for checking out the facts.

Real quick, here’s what you need to know:

• Amendment 50 will raise the bet limit from $5 to $100, and make for 24/7 gambling in Colorado. Right now Casinos have to close when bars do, at 2 a.m.

• About six percent of the money gambled will go to help community colleges.

• Most of the gambling money lost by gamblers goes directly to the Nevada casino corporations that are the biggest force behind the campaign spending more than $7 million to get this passed.

• This Amendment would also make it impossible to raise the tax rate on casinos, something that is legal now. Colorado has one of the lowest tax rates in the country on casinos.

• While some in education think this new money will help, others are concerned about linking education funding to gambling. Other states such as Connecticut and Pennsylvania have had to cut education programs when gambling revenue went down in the years after this passed.

• Mayor John Hickenlooper, Attorney General John Suthers, the Denver Post, the Fort Collins Coloradan and groups as diverse as the Boulder County Democratic Party and Focus on the Family are all against Amendment 50.

There are many more reasons to vote no. If you have another moment, please read more on this blog. What we’ve learned over and over is that the more people know about Amendment 50, the more they don’t like it.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for voting no on Amendment 50!

There’s only been one poll that we’ve heard about. It didn’t look good, but then we keep running into people who say they are opposed. We keep reading blog posts by people opposed. We keep reading newspaper editorials that even when they are not opposed they sure sound that way.

Which makes us wonder what the pollster asked. If he asked a question that sounded like the “Say Yes on 50″ commercials, well, of course it would poll well.

The problem is that voters are faced with the language of the actual amendment 50 or the Blue Book analysis. That leaves a lot of people confused, so they turn here, or maybe they ask a friend, or maybe they just decide that they don’t like being sold a load of manure in the advertising, and they just want to vote no because of that.

Anyway, if you are just researching this for the first time, check out this site, we have tons of information for you, and we’ll try to answer any questions submitted on our contact form as quickly as possible.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for voting no on Amendment 50!

Or to those of you just finding us through the Google, and there have been zillions of you. Welcome, all.

The candidate campaigns have worked everybody up into such a pitch that there’s not much room left to talk about the Amendments, and probably half the people have already voted so who knows how it will all play out?

As we noted, the polls don’t look good, but it’s never all that clear with ballot issues. We certainly like our trends with all of our web traffic recently, and a spate of new blog posts and even Facebook posts like this one:

A-50: This amendment has the most deceptive campaign of all the ballot initiatives. The amendment allows the three counties in Colorado that currently are allowed to have casinos to dramatically expand betting limits, hours of operation, and significantly alters the tax distribution and tax rate for casinos. The campaign is focused on the least important aspect of the change: funding for Community Colleges. Colorado Community Colleges are DRAMATICALLY underfunded, but that is not any reason to change our gaming regulations. The amendment was written by the gaming industry to funnel tax dollars into their own pockets for expansion and increase their profits. Don’t be deceived by this deceptive campaign, let’s demand REAL change to find a way to adequately fund our Community Colleges.
Recommendation: NO, NO, NO!

There’s even a whole Facebook Group against Amendment 50 that we just discovered. Awesome. The political theory is that young people will vote yes on this because it means “money for education.” Well, maybe young people know a phony add ploy when they see one.

What’s clear to us is that the more people of any age spend time studying Amendment 50, the less they like it. Will enough people study it closely enough to vote no?

In a couple days we’ll know.

By the way, lots of reporters have been asking us where we’ll be and if we’ll be available for reactions on Tuesday night. We’ll do our best to call everyone back Tuesday night from the glamorous KeepVegasOut Election Night Headquarters (otherwise known as the bar down the street) but we will probably just post our reaction here on this blog if the wifi is working, so check here first!

And yet…

Our web traffic continues to skyrocket. Given that we have no money, we would have been happy if a couple dozen people even found our site. Instead we are getting thousands of visitors and we know that people are finding our site.

And yet…

Anyone who studies the issue closely comes out against it. The latest is the Sterling Journal Advocate.

This is a bad amendment. This a pathetic and disgraceful way to fund education in Colorado. The payout to schools is an obvious effort to attach something good to a bad law in hopes of getting voter support.

And yet…

We continue to hear about how turned off people are by the advertising on the yes side. (By the way, their funding has continued to grow and is now at $7.6 million.) The quote in that story is very true, money is getting donated to the yes side NOT because casinos believe in community colleges, but because it’s in their business interest to do so.

So, read up on the issues here on this site, and then tell a friend! Thanks!

We got another note recently that reminded us of that one from Bart Berger, who happens to be the Chairman of the Board of the Colorado Historical Society, so he’s seen what has happened and what will happen with Gambling Revenue in Colorado.

We asked him to see if we could post here what he wrote, and he said as long as we were clear that it was not in his official capacity as chairman, but just as a “knowledgeable individual, and a loyal, fourth generation Coloradoan who thinks that this is a cynical, greed-driven measure, foisted on a naïve public, and misrepresented to the voters.”

That might give you a hint about what he’ll say, but here is the letter from Mr. Berger:

It is important to consider the effect on the Colorado Historical Fund that distributes the gaming revenues to historic preservation projects and programs around the state. $200 million toward economies in every county and virtually every community is a good, responsible effect of gaming. Heritage tourism and even State Pride are the beneficiaries here, and every dollar spent in theses efforts has a 8-1 impact in Colorado. What is the economic impact of these additional dollars under Amendment 50?

Amendment 50 puts limits on the growth of preservation money. Any growth that comes from increased gaming is capped for preservation, but not for the casino owners.

Consider that determining the dollars that are generated from increased limits have to be separately accounted for. It is not clear whether they get commingled and distributed in the same way as the previous money. Nevertheless, this is an unnecessary, byzantine and unrecognized part of all this. Who does the counting?

Consider that Amendment 50 changes who gets to set the tax rates. One would do well to know more about THAT.

Before you vote:

Consider that Amendment 50 is about greed, and not about economic development, not about what is COLORADO, and certainly not about you. Community Colleges? Sure, but at the CORE of this apple is a very bad worm.

We were remembering that because we went into hostile territory last week for a webcast with 9News. One of the community colleges that shares the Auraria campus with Metro and UCD.

The point we have been trying to make here is that Amendment 50 is actually too risky for community colleges. Right now they get money from the state, but that will go down — according to all the legislators who are salivating over the money — when the legislature opens.

So then the colleges get hurt if revenue goes down, and we know that it will.

But to make the case right in the middle of a community college campus? It went surprisingly well, nobody threw fast food at us while we talked, even though the interview was held in a food court, so we’ll call that a victory.

Not excusable, but understandable.

What’s interesting is actually reading the vote-yes endorsements. We wrote about this with once before, those urging a yes vote really did it while holding their noses.

Many other newspapers, however, did look at the issue, and urge a no vote.

• The Denver Post
• The Durango Herald
• The Steamboat Pilot
• The Cortez Journal
• The Fort Collins Coloradoan

There are probably a bunch more that we don’t know about, if you know of one and want to be on the list, let us know.

The blog endorsements that we have seen fall into three groups.

First is those who have studied the issue and come to it from some ideological perspective. They all urge a no vote. Liberals are against it. Conservatives are against it.

The second group has bloggers who were initially in favor of it, but then studied it and changed their minds.

The third group is those who favor it — I won’t link to them — but nearly every one is from a poker player who wants to be able to play poker against suckers in Colorado and make more money at it. Really just about everyone who publicly supports Amendment 50 is in it for the money.

Not with my constitution, thank you very much.

Denver Post illustration

The Denver Post is out with a story (and a cool graphic) about Amendment 50 this morning.

The biggest news in this story for us is the deflation of the argument the pro side makes about how we’ll have tourists coming to Colorado to gamble, so we’ll have outsiders paying taxes here. That sounded like bunkum to us, but we didn’t have time to make some calls up to South Dakota to see how it’s played out there for the last few years. Turns out, nobody really travels there to gamble.

Studies by the Deadwood Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau have shown that out-of-state tourists come to the area for the history and to see nearby sites, such as Mount Rushmore, but not the casinos. That’s an indication that much of the growth in gambling revenue has been fueled by locals.

“When you get outside of the 100-mile radius, they’re coming for the history of Deadwood, the whole Black Hills experience,” said George Milos, executive director of the Deadwood chamber.
As such, the chamber stopped marketing its $100 bet limit in Colorado two years ago, Milos said.

So, our question for this morning is this: Is there ANY argument the pro side has made that isn’t a bunch of distortions, half-truths, cynical misdirections or just plain old hokum?