The Colorado Supreme Court rejected multiple proposed ballot measures Monday that would have asked voters to redraw the state’s electoral maps for the 2028 election to give Democrats an advantage in seven of eight congressional districts.
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For now, the two unanimous rulings knock Colorado out of the nationwide partisan redistricting wars kicked off by President Donald Trump as Republican- and Democratic-led states have jockeyed for an advantage by adopting new congressional maps.
The state Supreme Court concluded that the ballot measures violated the state’s requirement that ballot proposals encompass only a single subject. The justices rejected claims by proponents that the proposals “point in the same direction.” Three of the rejected ballot measures were backed by Democrats seeking to grow their congressional power in the state, while two more were backed by conservatives with similar aims for Republican candidates.
“Changing long-settled law by modifying the timing, frequency, criteria, and entity responsible for congressional redistricting represents a significant change beyond the proponents’ stated central purposes (of) … congressional redistricting by adopting a new temporary map,” Chief Justice Monica Márquez wrote in one of the opinions.
The single-subject requirement is intended to prevent voter confusion or “log-rolling,” meaning when a voter supports one part of a complex ballot initiative but not another.
In two opinions, the justices wrote that the various measures raised log-rolling concerns because they generally would’ve changed how maps are drawn while also instituting new maps in 2028 and 2030, in ways favorable to either Democrats or Republicans.
The justices argued that a voter might want to change how districts are drawn overall but may not support the partisan map proposals in the upcoming elections, or vice versa.
In her opinion rejecting two of the ballot measures, Márquez wrote that each proposal “represents a seismic shift to Colorado’s longstanding redistricting process enshrined in the state constitution.” The other opinion was authored by Justice Richard L. Gabriel.
The rulings were welcomed by conservative groups, while the campaign that filed the Democratic ballot measures called the outcome “a legal setback over a technicality.”
Democrats and Republicans currently have a 4-4 split in representation in Colorado’s U.S. House districts, with one of those considered a swing district. Colorado’s congressional and state legislative districts are drawn by independent redistricting commissions, which were created through separate ballot measures and first produced maps in 2022, after the 2020 census.
Unless voters pass another measure changing the process, those congressional boundaries will be in effect until the commission undertakes the next regular round of redistricting, after the 2030 census.
Because the changes proposed through the new ballot measures would’ve taken effect in 2028, they wouldn’t have directly impacted the tight race for control of Congress in November. But the rulings will delay any move by Colorado in the redistricting wars until at least 2028, when redrafted proposals could next be introduced.
The court’s decisions represent a win for conservatives in Colorado, who had sought to protect both the state’s independent redistricting process and the Republican-leaning congressional seats that would’ve been imperiled by Democrat-friendly revisions.
Had the Democrat-backed proposals advanced and passed this November, liberal candidates would’ve had a distinct advantage in as many as seven of the state’s seats for the 2028 and 2030 elections.
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The defeat scuttles Democrats’ efforts to expand the redistricting wars, which kicked off last year after Texas Republicans altered their maps. That was followed by a spree of map-redrawing across the country.
In Colorado, Democrats initially sought to redraw the state’s maps ahead of the 2028 election — the soonest new boundaries could take effect here — prompting retaliatory proposals from Republicans. But given Colorado’s distinctly Democratic voter base, the liberal push was likely to find more fertile ground, had one of the Democrats’ measures reached the ballot box.
A spokesman for the Colorado Democratic Party said officials were still reviewing the decisions. In a statement, the campaign backing the Democratic proposals, Coloradans for a Level Playing Field, said the justices “thwarted” Colorado’s effort to push back against President Donald Trump.
“The success of this partisan attempt to sideline Coloradans from responding to Donald Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade redistricting scheme is disappointing,” said Curtis Hubbard, a spokesman for the campaign. “While Trump and his MAGA allies regularly sidestep the law and ignore voters, efforts to respond have once again been dealt a legal setback over a technicality.”
Republicans, meanwhile, declared victory.
Michael Fields, the president of the conservative advocacy group Advance Colorado, said the court had “accurately decided that political games cannot be played with Colorado’s Congressional maps.”
Scott Gessler, a former secretary of state whose law firm filed the Republican measures, wrote that the court “soundly rejected the Democratic efforts to manipulate the ballot process to overturn Colorado’s nonpartisan redistricting process.”
Three of the ballot measures were tangled together. Two of them, Initiatives 241 and 242, would’ve replaced the existing redistricting process and implemented new, temporary maps for 2028 and 2030, respectively.
Each would have taken effect only if the other passed. Republicans, in response, filed Initiative 328. It, too, would’ve passed only had Initiative 241 been approved. The measure would’ve also implemented new maps, albeit not the Democratic-friendly ones proposed by 242.
Coloradans for a Level Playing Field had already raised $2.3 million and had spent more than $2 million of it, in large part to gather signatures for the ballot. Much of that money came from the Fairness Project, which has backed liberal ballot measures elsewhere, and American Opportunity Action, a relatively new, Democrat-aligned dark money outfit.
The campaign also received $150,000 from a political action committee tied to the Democratic caucus in the U.S. House.
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