Renee Parsons
With approach of the 2024 election, voter integrity continues to be an ongoing problem since a majority of the country is still operating under rules adopted during the Covid pandemic. In Colorado, there is a proposed State Initiative 310 that would further threaten the integrity of the American sacrosanct ‘one person/one vote’ principle.
A massive, monumental threat to voter integrity in Colorado in the form of Ranked Choice Voting promises to dramatically alter election results and mislead how voters make their choices from a field of bipartisan qualified candidates.
If adopted, SI 310, otherwise known as Rank Choice Voting, would eliminate any opportunity to restore election integrity as an ultimate disaster creating a weakening of both political parties in the State. Petitions needing 125,000 valid signatures to place SI 310 on the November ballot are currently circulating throughout the State.
As the State GOP continues to wrestle with fierce internal party squabbles after a disappointing June primary, passage of SI 310 would especially focus on derailing the GOP which has been attempting to regain the political initiative since the unanimous Supreme Court decision on the Fourteenth Amendment.
Support for RCV comes from the same Billionaire Uniparty class who sponsored the effort to remove Donald Trump from the statewide Presidential ballot as it continues to cling to power creating the June primary fiasco.
If in fact the disputed removal of State GOP Chair Dave Williams, among other contentious issues, continues for the next few months, the party must rise above the rancor and come together to permanently defeat SI 310. The future of building the State’s GOP membership into an effective America First political agenda as well as laying the foundation for attracting and cultivating powerful political voices as GOP candidates for future electoral campaigns is at stake.
The fact that the current electoral system which allows cross-over voters in a partisan primary to which the voter is not a member would, by necessity, be eliminated in favor of the RCV further muddying and unnecessarily complicating the state’s primary election process. A clever and complicated election fraud scam, RCV intent is to steal your vote with no guarantee that a favored candidate will be elected. The final analysis is that an RCV election will not be a true reflection of the will of the people.
For instance, here’s a synopsis of how it would work: if there are six candidates for a State Senate seat, all of those candidates will be listed. Just as all voters in that District, not just the Dems or Republicans, will ‘rank’ their favorite candidates. That initial ranking must include at least five of those candidates and at least one candidate must have received 50% of the vote.
If there is no 50% candidate on the first round, the vote continues until four candidates remain for the November general election. Those four final candidates may be all Democrats or all Republicans or any other combination that may not reflect the constituency of that District. None of those candidates need be an official representative of any political party.
If that sounds confusing, that’s because it is – deliberately so. While its proponents pretend that RCV is necessary to modernize democracy or reform the current bipartisan electoral primary, that is not the intent of RCV.
In Alaska which adopted RCV in 2020, Alaskans for Honest Election have collected 43,000 petition signatures to remove RCV from their state’s electoral process. In 2019, the Maine legislature passed a bill establishing RCV, the State’s GOP filed a referendum petition to repeal, the state’s Democratic Secretary of State denied the motion. The RCV continues to experience a turbulent future in Maine.
In 2022, Tennessee, Florida, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota all banned RCV. In 2024, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Oklahoma banned statewide use of RCV.
Passage of 310 has all the potential of deliberately disenfranchising the Colorado voter as setting back the GOP’s conservative political progress for another decade. While the State’s AFL-CIO opposes 310, the LWV are in support.