Colorado voters on Tuesday rejected an effort to dramatically change how the state’s elections are conducted.
As of 10 p.m., 55.56% of Colorado voters opposed changing the electoral procedures for the state legislature and state offices — governor, attorney general, treasurer, secretary of state, the State Board of Education and the University of Colorado Board of Regents — as well as federal races for Colorado’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Just over 44% of voters supported Proposition 131. More than 2.2 million votes had been counted so far.
“This is a win for Colorado voters, and a win for democracy against a historic spending spree by wealthy individuals and special interests on a Colorado ballot measure,” Sean Hinga, a spokesperson for the anti-Proposition 131 campaign, said in a statement. “Let this be a lesson to big money that grassroots power is still alive and well in Colorado when voters do their homework and cast a ballot.”
ELECTION RESULTS: Live Colorado election results for the 2024 election
The measure would have replaced the state’s current primary system with a single open primary in each affected race — meaning all candidates would compete against each other in a primary, regardless of party.
Proposition 131 would also have instituted a ranked-choice voting system, under which voters in the general election would rank each candidate in a given race by preference.
The top four vote-getters in the primary — regardless of party — would advance to the general election.
If no candidate earns a majority in the first round of voting, the candidate with the fewest top rankings gets eliminated. Any ballot that had that candidate as the top choice then automatically shifts to that voter’s next-highest-ranking candidate, and the tabulation begins again. It continues in rounds until one candidate secures a majority of votes.
Proposition 131 “would have sacrificed the safety and security of our election system for the whims of special interests and big corporations whose pay-to-play tactics would have flooded the state with even more dark money,” Shad Murib, chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, said in a statement.
The measure was the brainchild of Denver millionaire Kent Thiry, who has successfully placed other election-related measures on the ballot in recent years.
“Reforms of this magnitude take time and effort,” Thiry said in a statement conceding defeat Tuesday evening. “Campaigns that have been on the right side of history — from women’s suffrage, to civil rights, to marriage equality — were all journeys that experienced defeat before finding overwhelming victories. This is just one step on our journey for open primaries and ranked voting.”
The campaign was among the most expensive Colorado ballot measure efforts of this century, according to state campaign finance data. As of Monday morning, the Colorado Voters First campaign had raised more than $18.1 million (a figure that includes $135,000 in non-monetary support) to back Prop 131.
The campaign had spent nearly $14.3 million through late October. Final spending and fundraising totals won’t be released until December.
Those totals still lagged behind the oil and gas lobby’s $38.7 million in spending — and $41.7 million in fundraising — in the 2018 election. A 2014 campaign to increase school funding raised roughly $19.8 million.
In the final days of the Proposition 131 campaign, Thiry donated more than $2.8 million, upping his total contribution to back the measure to just under $6 million. He was joined in his late infusion by the Chevron Corporation, the oil and gas giant that gave $500,000 in late October.
Additional support came from an array of other wealthy benefactors, from the co-founders of Netflix and Riot Games to a scion of the Walmart-founding Walton family. The Colorado Chamber of Commerce gave $500,000. Kimball Musk, brother of Trump megadonor and the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, also donated, as did Larry Mizel, the Denver businessman who’s hosted two Trump fundraisers in recent months.
Voter Rights Colorado, the primary group opposing 131, raised nearly $600,000 — including more than $200,000 in the last week — and spent $284,000 as of late October. Much of the group’s late money came from the left-wing Working Families Party and its sister organization, as well as from labor groups like the AFL-CIO, SEIU and Colorado Wins, which represents state employees.
