BeanMan is right on the mark: this program has moved a very long way from its original intent, to the detriment of the resource and public hunting opportunity.
The program was originally established to provide incentive to landowners who provide valuable big game habitat to continue doing so, and provide hunt opportunities for the landowner's family in limited draw units. The program originally stemmed from problems on the eastern plains, which have always been limited entry units, where landowners complained that they were being harrrassed by metropolitan hunters for permission to hunt and their own family members couldn't even obtain licenses to hunt their own land every year. When Colorado went to limited drawing for deer statewide, this program morphed into a dangerous privitization of a public resource for two reasons: 1) the abundance of public lands surrounding a relatively few private landowners (as compared with eastern plains units where there is almost no public land to speak of) and 2) the relatively higher deer populations and the resulting abundance of licenses available in western slope units. The surplus of tags created a commodity to which a dollar value could be attached.
Adding to the problem is the fact that the existing rules governing the system are nearly impossible to enforce. Current regulations state that landowners receiving vouchers must allow "reasonable public access" to their properties, yet state law prevents the publication of landowner or license-holder names, so the public has no way of knowing what landowners received tags, and the DOW has no way to enforce the access issue. It is widely known that the vast majority of landowners recieving these tags equate "reasonable access" with "NO access" and they are fully aware of the enforcability problem. So they have their cake and eat it too.
As Grasshopper pointed out, many landowners who get these vouchers also outfit and/or lease their private ground out, and do not (in some cases cannot, due to lease stipulations) allow public access. So a wealthy few individuals who can afford the exhorbitant voucher prices are allowed to buy into premier units every year and hunt public lands with the regular sportsmen who in many cases must wait 8 or 10 years or more to gain the same privilege. Meanwhile, the wealthy hunter is also allowed to continue playing the preference point game and competing with regular hunters on that playing field as well. And landowners don't dare use these vouchers for themselves or their family as the original intent of the program provided, because they see dollar signs with multiple zeroes behind them. We've turned wildlife, a publicly-owned resource, into a private commodity for a very privileged few. This is a serious conflict of interest and a major problem with this program, and the entire thing is money-driven. The system simply was not designed to handle most of the situations we find on the western slope in premier deer units, and vouchers have become unbelievably valuable. Further, neither the DOW nor the Wildlife Commission has ever moved to change the program, while the landowner lobby groups (Cattleman's, Woolgrowers, Farm Bureau, etc) have lobbied long and hard to maintain the status quo, and more recently, to increase the number of private vouchers, which are pulled off the top of the license quota, which means fewer draw opportunities for the average sportsman.
The Commission's recent action to "require" private land access is a huge joke, because that's already in the regulations. All they did was try to divert attention and avoid a fight by giving the rule it's own line-item number and putting it in bold print. The rules haven't changed and neither has the enforcability.
Buckspy is right, you may see some far more significant changes to the program in the near future because the state legislature has recognized these problems and there are bills now being drafted to put the checks and balances in place that the Wildlife Commission has not had the political will to implement. In my opinion, the changes are long overdue.