The Colorado State Supreme Court on Monday ruled that having computers speed-read bills on the legislative floor is unconstitutional.

The Colorado constitution provides that all bills that come before the legislature shall be read aloud on two different days in each house, unless all the members present consent to waive the reading. The controversy at issue in this case began in March 2019 when the state senate was considering passage of House Bill 19-1172, a recodification that ran over 2,000 pages in length. The senate could not get unanimous consent to waive the reading, so the senate secretary, with the blessing of the senate president, had the text of the bill uploaded to several computers with automated reading software, and set all of them to read different portions of the bill at a pace of 650 words per minute, which according to the court produced a “babel of sounds.”

Several senators filed suit requesting an injunction preventing such computerized reading and against the passage of the bill, which they claimed was in violation of the constitution. The district court found that the automated reading at a high rate of speed was a violation of the reading requirement, and further ordered that in the future legislation must be read “in an intelligible manner and at an understandable speed.” The supreme court affirmed the lower court’s determination that the computerized reading was unconstitutional, but concluded the lower court overstepped its bounds when it tried to dictate the manner in which the legislature complies with the reading requirement.

Three justices dissented, noting that the constitutional provision merely requires that a bill be “read” and not that it “be read ‘by a human voice’ or ‘slowly enough to be intelligible,’ or that the sections of the bill be read ‘in sequence’ or even at a particular decibel level.” They also noted that the practice of reading bills aloud now fulfills more of a ceremonial role rather than the practical function it had when the constitution was enacted, and would have reversed the whole of the lower court’s ruling.