From left, former DaVita CEO Kent Thiry, Unite America executive director Nick Troiano, First Choice Counts founder Jason Lupo and Republican activist Candice Stutzriem participate in a debate on Proposition 131 at the University of Denver on Oct. 24, 2024. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)
Colorado voters on Tuesday appeared to reject a sweeping plan to overhaul the state’s elections system hatched by some of the state’s wealthiest and most influential political donors.
Proposition 131, backed by the group Colorado Voters First, was on track to be rejected by voters, with 55.4% opposed and 44.6% in favor as of 12:08 a.m. Wednesday.
The measure proposed to abolish party primaries for most state and federal offices, replacing them with “all-candidate” primaries for each race, and established ranked choice voting for general elections.
The Colorado measure was one of six on the ballot in 2024 bankrolled by the nonprofit Unite America, which backed a successful effort to establish such a system in Alaska in 2020. The group is co-chaired by Kent Thiry, former CEO of Denver-based dialysis services company DaVita, who previously sponsored successful efforts to open Colorado’s primaries and create independent redistricting commissions.
Thiry and other proponents, including Gov. Jared Polis and U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, argued that ending partisan primaries will reduce polarization and political dysfunction. Colorado Voters First received over $16 million in contributions from a list of donors that included Thiry, Unite America, Walmart heir Ben Walton, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Kathryn Murdoch, the daughter-in-law of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Critics of Proposition 131 argued that it would have privileged wealthy candidates and diminish the value of grassroots campaigning. Both the Colorado Democratic Party and the Colorado Republican Party opposed the measure.
In the face of a deep-pocketed and well-connected campaign in support of the measure, however, organized opposition was scant. Voter Rights Colorado, a left-leaning issue committee, raised a roughly $500,000 to campaign against the measure. First Choice Counts, an opposition campaign with Republican ties, raised even less, reporting just $8,000 in donations.
Some local elections officials also expressed skepticism about the feasibility of some of Proposition 131’s provisions and deadlines.
Ranked choice voting, also known as instant-runoff voting, is a method in which voters rank as many or as few of the four candidates as they wish; candidates with the fewest first-place votes are eliminated until one candidate receives a majority. Variations of ranked choice voting systems have been proposed and adopted in the U.S. going back more than a century, and it’s already in use at the local level in a handful of Colorado communities, including Boulder, which held its first ranked choice voting election last year.
The elimination of partisan primaries in favor of an all-candidate primary, sometimes known as a “jungle” primary, was a newer idea. Currently, only California and Washington state hold jungle primaries for congressional and state legislative elections, from which the top two candidates advance to a head-to-head general election.
Unite America’s model fuses the two ideas into the top-four system. Alaska approved a ballot measure adopting the model in 2020 and became the first state to hold an election under the Unite America model in 2022.
The system was credited with helping to elect Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, who defeated former Gov. Sarah Palin to become the first Democrat to represent the state in the House in 50 years, as well as with moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski’s defeat of a more conservative challenger.
But those results helped fuel a backlash to the new system, especially among many Alaska Republicans, who put a repeal measure on the ballot this year.
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