In less than two weeks, Coloradans will vote on Proposition 131, a ballot initiative that would abolish party primaries and create a top-four ranked choice voting (RCV) system for most state and federal elections in Colorado.
On Thursday, the University of Denver held a debate between the proposition’s proponents and two conservative opponents of the measure.
Proposition 131 is backed by the Denver-based nonprofit Unite America, the same organization that lobbied for the model now used in Alaska. It hopes to expand this form of RCV to six other states in 2024.
On the side arguing for Prop 131 were Unite America’s executive director Nick Troiano and DaVita CEO Kent Thiry, who previously bankrolled the successful effort to create open primaries and an independent redistricting commission in Colorado.
The opposing side of the debate was represented by two conservative activists, Jason Lupo, who unsuccessfully ran as a Republican for the state Legislature and founded First Choice Counts (an issue committee registered in opposition to Prop 131), and Candice Stutzriem from the Truth and Liberty Coalition.
“Prop 131 is about giving voters more voice, choice, and power in our elections,” said Troiano in his introduction of the initiative. “It’s about giving us the power to vote our true preferences. It’s about making candidates represent all of us. It’s about making our leaders produce better results on the issues that we care about.”
If Proposition 131 were to pass, all candidates for state and federal offices would run in a single, open primary (often referred to as a jungle primary). The top four from this open primary would move on to the general election, which would be conducted through ranked-choice voting, a method by which voters would rank as many (or as few) of the four candidates they prefer. The candidate in each race with the fewest first-place votes would eliminated until one candidate receives over fifty percent of the vote. As the proposition is written, it would apply to elections for governor, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, statewide executive offices, and the Legislature.
Lupo disagrees with the proposition arguing that it’s aimed at eliminating left-leaning and right-leaning candidates. “This is a way to eliminate the progressives, it’s a way to eliminate the conservatives and ‘get back’ to centrist values,” argues Lupo. “I am a pretty far-right conservative, but I still believe that there’s value in the discourse the far-left brings.”
Lupo went on to add, “The goal of ranked-choice voting is to find more centrist candidates. It’s who’s going to do the bidding of special interest groups and lobbies.”
Kent Thiry objected to Lupo’s characterization of the proposition saying that “nothing could be further from the truth.”
“We treasure the broad spectrum of ideas across different political philosophies,” said Thiry. “However, while we don’t want to have all candidates live in the middle of the policy world, we do want them to be able to meet in the middle when common sense dictates. That’s something that no longer happens with the same sort of frequency that we need.”
Stutzriem expressed concern that the process of ranked-choice voting would shift power away from local county clerks to a more centralized, less accountable system.
“How, literally, is that going to happen? Are we going to physically take these ballots to [Colorado Secretary of State] Jena Griswold’s garage, and count them there together? Are we going to trust Dominion voting machines to count these ballots?” Stutzriem asked, alluding to conspiracies that Dominion Voting System, an election equipment company, rigged the 2020 presidential election.
There has been a conservative backlash to the rank-choice voting movement. Two polls from last month indicated that Proposition 131 had a stark partisan gap in support, with one poll conducted by Colorado Community Research finding that 56% of Democrats and unaffiliated voters favored the measure compared to 32% of Republicans.
According to reporting by NPR, Republicans have taken steps to prohibit ranked choice voting and state and local levels with at least five bans having been enacted by GOP-controlled state legislatures this year.
However, Republicans are not the only groups opposed to Proposition 131. Colorado’s Democratic Party, Green Party, and Working Families Party all oppose the proposition, as do progressive organizations like the Colorado AFL-CIO, New Era Colorado, and ProgressNow Colorado. In this regard, the proposition has united figures from the right, like Lauren Boebert, and left-wing figures, like Jill Stein and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren against the measure.
After the debate, the Colorado Times Recorder spoke with Ellen Dumm, who works as an election judge in Chaffee County, who also opposes Proposition 131.
“It’s complicated, it’s expensive, and it’s not good for Colorado. It’s not that RCV is necessarily bad, but the way they have written the proposition is very light on details. They never talked to county clerks prior to getting it on the ballot and during the process of getting it on the ballot,” Dumm said. “Clerks are now saying it will be almost impossible to implement before 2026, which is the deadline in the initiative. And at the end of the session last year, they proposed an amendment to the secretary of state that said you got to go out and test this across the state in different demographic areas before we know this is actually going to work. They have raised some red flags about whether or not this can actually be implemented in 2026. Part of the problem is only half of the candidates on the ballot are subject to 131. What it’s asking Colorado voters to do is vote two different ways in both the general and the general and the primary. … It’s asking voters to take a big leap in understanding what they’re proposing.”
Dumm thought that Proposition 131, as it’s proposed, would cause an array of logistical hurdles to even get it implemented and could lead to votes being invalidated.
“Any time you tweak anything on the ballot, voters get confused,” said Dumm. “When they get confused, they spoil their ballot and that means their vote is invalidated and they may never know. The University of Pennsylvania did a study that says a vote in a ranked-choice voting election is ten times more likely to invalidate a vote than in a regular one-on-one, head-to-head election. You need a massive amount of public education before you can implement this. It took Boulder County, which is the only county that has done this under Colorado law, three years and they only did [RCV] for the mayor’s race. And it cost them … at least $180,000 more than what they normally would have spent in a regular municipal election. On the municipal level, municipalities can decide to do RCV anytime they want in it. It usually works fairly well in local municipality races. When you scale it statewide, it comes with lots and lots and lots of problems.”
Opponents of Proposition 131 have also raised concerns that the ballot measure is an attempt by Thiry and other wealthy donors to exert more power over Colorado politics.
In the debate, Troiano argued that most counties in Colorado already use software compatible with RCV and that concerns over logistics/voter confusion were contradicted by Alaska’s experience with ranked-choice voting.
“There is no state in the country that is more difficult to administer an election than Alaska,” Troiano argued. “Over 85% of the election geographies aren’t connected by roads. Twenty percent of the population is Alaska Native, which means ballots have to be translated into close to a dozen different languages.”
“Our opponents are right about one thing, that this election system we’re proposing isn’t perfect. But no election system is. That’s a fact. The choice isn’t between some perfect system that might exist and this proposal. It’s between what we’ve got today and this proposal.”
