KUNC: A Denver district court judge on Friday ruled against state lawmakers and ordered them to stop using a secret ballot system to rank bills.

In his ruling, Judge David Goldberg said “the public has the right to know” how individual lawmakers vote to prioritize bills and that the so-called quadratic voting system at the Capitol violates Colorado’s Open Meetings Law.

KUNC Investigative Reporter Scott Franz broke the story in 2022, revealing how secret ballots were quietly killing bills and raising transparency concerns at the statehouse. In the quadratic voting system, each spring since 2019 lawmakers clicked on a personalized link to an anonymous survey. They then used digital tokens to vote for the bills they thought should get a piece of the budget.

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