How Colorado’s Proposition 131 Reform Initiative Would Change Elections

The November election is approaching quickly — so quickly that Colorado’s ballots will begin arriving in mailboxes just two weeks from now. The Denver Post’ staff is now at work on our fall election coverage. Our aim, as always, is to inform readers about the candidates, the ballot measures they’ll decide and the major issues that are playing into races. But to focus our coverage this year, we’ve relied on your input more than ever. The Denver Post is among dozens of newsrooms statewide that joined together in the spring to launch the Voter Voices project through the Colorado News Collaborative.

Westminster is making it clear the city doesn’t want to increase access to hikers and cyclists visiting the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge — the one-time site of a Cold War nuclear weapons plant that continues to spark health worries 30 years after it closed. The city last week became the second community surrounding the 6,200-acre federal property to withdraw from an intergovernmental agreement supporting construction of a tunnel and bridge into the refuge, home to more than 200 wildlife species, including prairie falcons, deer, elk, coyotes and songbirds. Broomfield exited the $4.7 million Federal Lands Access Program agreement four years ago, and both cities point to potential threats to public health from residual contamination at the site — most notably the plutonium that was used in nuclear warhead production over four decades — for their withdrawal. “I think we have a moral obligation to get out of this,” Westminster Councilman Obi Ezeadi said during a meeting Monday night. Westminster’s withdrawal comes less than a month after a federal judge denied several environmental organizations a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the project cold.

Denver Health spent much of the last year laying the groundwork for a proposed sales tax increase that its leaders see as crucial for shoring up the system’s long-strained budget. But just as the Denver City Council was considering sending that tax to the ballot in June, news emerged that Mayor Mike Johnston was teeing up an even bigger ask for voters: a new dedicated sales tax — the largest in city history — to pay for his affordable housing initiatives. Now both are on Denver’s November ballot, and if both pass they would add a combined 0.84 percentage points to the city’s effective 8.81% sales tax rate — pushing it to 9.65%, among the higher rates in the state.

Proposition 131 on Colorado’s November ballot proposes significant changes to how many high-profile elections would be conducted. If passed by voters, the measure would apply to races for state offices (including for statewide officials and the legislature) and federal representatives to Congress. In each race, an open primary would be held for all candidates — instead of party primaries — with up to four top vote-getters advancing to the general election. In that fall election, the winner would be determined through ranked-choice voting, a process that supporters argue is more likely to result in a consensus candidate winning the election. Here is how that system would play out in one hypothetical scenario — a future race for governor. The race Let’s zoom forward to 2034, when five Democrats are running for governor.

Kent Thiry first came to Colorado in 1973 for a high school student government conference. After the four-day event ended, the teen called his parents back in Wisconsin to ask for some money. He didn’t want to leave just yet. “I drove down I-70, and I was blown away as I drove around the state — how beautiful it was,” he recounts now from the back patio of his mansion in Cherry Hills Village.

We are in the middle of an information war, and the globalists are running the opposing side.