Two leaders of a movement seeking to drastically overhaul the way Colorado and other states conduct their elections squared off in a debate Thursday night with two conservative Republicans, representing a political bloc that polls show remain the movement’s harshest critics.
Coloradans will vote on Proposition 131, which would abolish party primaries and establish a top-four ranked choice voting system for nearly all state and federal elections. It’s backed by Unite America, a Denver-based nonprofit, which pioneered its model in Alaska and is hoping to spread it to at least six other states in 2024.
The ballot measure has drawn opposition from both Republicans and Democrats. Thursday’s debate, hosted by the University of Denver and Colorado Politics, featured two of Proposition 131’s most prominent right-wing opponents.
“Prop 131 is about giving voters more voice, choice and power in our elections.” said Nick Troiano, Unite America’s executive director. “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.”
Under the proposed system, all candidates for each office would run in a single, open primary election, from which the top four vote-getters would advance. The general election would be decided by ranked choice voting, a method in which voters rank as many or as few of the four candidates as they wish, and candidates with the fewest first-place votes are eliminated until one candidate receives a majority. The system would apply to elections for U.S. House, U.S. Senate, governor and other statewide executive offices, and the state Legislature.
Jason Lupo, a Republican activist from Colorado Springs and former candidate for the state Legislature, is the founder of First Choice Counts, one of two issue committees registered to oppose Proposition 131.
“This is a way to eliminate the progressives, it’s a way to eliminate the conservatives and get back to centrist values,” said Lupo. “Yes, I am a pretty far-right conservative, but I still believe that there’s value in the discourse that the far left brings.”
“The goal of ranked choice voting is to find the more centrist candidates,” he added. “It’s who’s going to do the bidding of the special interest groups and the lobbies.”
The man supplying much of the financial firepower behind Unite America’s efforts, former DaVita CEO Kent Thiry, insisted that “nothing could be further from the truth.”
“We treasure the broad spectrum of ideas across the different political philosophies,” Thiry said. “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. And that’s what no longer happens with the same sort of frequency that we need.”
Thiry, who has previously bankrolled successful efforts to open Colorado’s primaries and establish independent redistricting commissions, serves as Unite America’s co-chair and has given nearly $1.5 million to Colorado Voters First, the issue committee supporting Proposition 131. The group has also received six- and seven-figure contributions from Walmart heir Ben Walton, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Kathryn Murdoch, the daughter-in-law of right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Two polls conducted last month showed Proposition 131 on track to be approved by voters, but both suggested the measure is significantly more popular among Democrats than among Republicans.
A poll released by Colorado Voters First and conducted by Keating Research found that 46% of Colorado Republicans supported the measure, with 30% opposed and 24% undecided. More than two-thirds of registered Democrats, meanwhile, said they supported the proposal, with 19% undecided and just 14% opposed. An independent poll conducted by Colorado Community Research, which surveyed voters in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, also found a stark partisan gap, with 56% of both Democrats and unaffiliated voters in favor of the measure, compared to just 32% of Republicans.
Nationwide, Republicans have spearheaded a movement to prohibit ranked choice voting at the state and local levels, and at least five bans have been enacted by GOP-controlled states this year, according to NPR.
Election results in Alaska, which became the first state to use a top-four ranked choice voting system in 2022, helped fuel the right-wing backlash. In the state’s lone congressional race, voters elected U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, the first Democrat to represent Alaska in the House in 50 years, while moderate Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski defeated a more conservative Republican challenger. With support from top Alaska Republicans, an initiative on the ballot there in 2024 aims to repeal the system just four years after its approval.
In addition to ideological concerns, opponents of Proposition 131 have raised issues like cost, implementation challenges and the potential for voter confusion. Candice Stutzriem, another Republican activist arguing in opposition to the measure at Thursday’s debate, said the process of counting ranked votes would shift power from local county clerks to a more centralized and less accountable system.
“How, literally, is that going to happen?” Stutzriem asked. “Are we going to physically take these ballots, what, to (Colorado Secretary of State) Jena Griswold’s garage, and count them there together?”
But Troiano said that most Colorado counties already use elections software that is compatible with ranked choice voting, and fears about logistics and voter confusion are belied by Alaska’s experience.
“There’s no state in the country that is more difficult to administer an election (in) than Alaska,” he said. “Over 85% of the election geographies aren’t connected by road. 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, which is that this election system we’re proposing isn’t perfect,” Troiano added. “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.”
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