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This past Saturday, in accordance with our bylaws and Colorado Revised Statutes, our State Central Committee (SCC) met to vote on whether to change from nominating candidates through a primary election to nominating them through an assembly or convention, commonly referred to as “opting out.”
While this meeting had moments of confusion, I wanted to reassure the over 900,000 Republicans across the State of Colorado that there will be a Republican primary election in 2026.
Our bylaws require the SCC to meet between August 15 and October 1 in odd-numbered years to vote on whether to change from nominating candidates through a primary election to nominating them through an assembly or convention.
That statute that dictates this vote, § 1-4-702 (1), mandates that at least three-fourths of the total membership of the party’s state central committee (not just those present) vote to do so. Every odd year since this law has been implemented, the SCC has never met the threshold to opt out.
Two years ago, the Chairman at the time used the State Party apparatus to actively campaign to opt out. He failed to garner enough support.
In Spring 2024, the former chairman and his allies set out on a multi-year plan to circumnavigate the law. They tried to bind the party into opting out by rigging the opt-out vote. At the State Assembly in April 2024, they rammed through a resolution that directed the Central Committee not to count “no” votes in any opt-out vote and asserted that the State Assembly can direct the SCC to rig an opt-out vote like this.
Of course, our State Assembly cannot rewrite either the opt-out statute or our bylaws, both of which require an opt-out “vote.” And under state law, the State Assembly can only direct the SCC to resolve a controversy over the regularity of the party’s organization or the use of its name while the State Assembly is in session. An opt-out vote is not such a controversy. And the State Assembly is not in session. But, by stringing together this chain of errors, the former chairman convinced many that the SCC could hold a rigged, pre-determined opt-out vote.
Fast forward to Saturday, a group of our SCC members then tried to claim that by following this vote-rigging procedure, a majority of the members present could force the party to opt out.
Several SCC members then contacted the Secretary of State’s office to inform her that our party had decided against holding a primary. We intervened and presented the vote totals from Saturday’s meeting to the Secretary of State, i.e., we presented an outcome of Saturday’s meeting that was not rigged, but true. The Secretary of State’s office responded that we must follow the law, and did not meet the threshold for opting out.
After two failed attempts to run for Congress and getting rejected by nearly two-to-one votes each time in the primary, our former chairman hijacked our party for the purpose of changing the rules towards the only scenario in which he would be electable, limiting the number of people who choose our party’s nominees to a small group of insiders.
We are returning the party to one of integrity, one that abides by the rule of law, and one that will not get bullied into disfranchising the silent majority of our members for the benefit of a fringe few.
Those who peddled this opt-out nonsense may never join us, but we will never stop fighting for the 900,000 Republicans across our state who want to see our party prosper.
In Liberty
