A Colorado ballot initiative that would establish a top-four primary system similar to Alaska's cleared a key hurdle last week when a board of state officials gave it a title and ruled that the proposed constitutional amendment complied with the single-subject requirement. Unless a voter challenges the board's decisions, supporters could start gathering voter signatures to get the measure onto November's ballot once Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold's office creates a petition format.
For elected federal and state offices, excluding the presidency and judges, the reform would replace traditional party primaries with one where all candidates—regardless of party—run on a single ballot. The top four vote-getters in the primary would then advance to a general election using instant-runoff voting, also known as ranked-choice voting. If one of those top four finishers withdraws or dies before general election ballots are printed, the primary candidate with the next-highest number of votes would take their place.
Colorado currently allows candidates to get onto their party's primary ballot by gathering voter signatures or winning at least 30% at their party's pre-primary convention, but this reform would do away with the latter system and enable all voters to sign petitions for any candidate. Another significant change would be abolishing same-party appointments for filling vacant state-legislative seats. Instead, special elections would be held using an unspecified process to be devised by the state, though the initiative does require that the winning candidate obtain a majority of the vote.
Once supporters are cleared to begin gathering signatures, they would have until no later than Aug. 5 to obtain 124,238 voter signatures statewide and an amount equal to 2% of registered voters in each of the 35 state Senate districts. If the proposal qualifies for November's ballot, it would need at least 55% support from voters to pass.
This reform effort is being spearheaded by wealthy former DaVita CEO Kent Thiry, who has spent big to promote reforms that supposedly empower moderate voters.
DaVita is one of the world's largest kidney-dialysis firms, and he was one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country in 2011. While leading DaVita, he was also known for eccentric behavior that included requiring employees to sing the company's song "hundreds" of times a year and regularly wearing a "Three Musketeers" costume at work, where one such skit had a company "musketeer" killing a federal official for threatening to reduce the government's dialysis reimbursement rates.
Thiry considered running for governor in 2018 as an ostensibly centrist Republican. However, he ultimately chose not to run as the media reported that DaVita had recently paid nearly $1 billion to settle federal investigations into corruption and alleged efforts to defraud the government, though the company admitted no wrongdoing. Since then, the Department of Justice took DaVita and Thiry to court for allegedly conspiring with competitors to violate antitrust law, but a jury acquitted them in 2022.
Thiry has given roughly $6 million to support ballot initiatives since 2016, and past ventures include a successful initiative that year to require primaries for presidential nominations by abolishing caucuses, and another to let unaffiliated voters vote in a party's primary. (The GOP is currently challenging the latter in court.) In 2018, he supported two successful measures that legislators had unanimously voted to put on the ballot to create independent redistricting commissions for congressional and legislative elections.