Blue State Supreme Court Derails Democrats’ Redistricting Push

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday tossed out several proposed ballot measures that would have asked voters to redraw the state’s congressional maps before the 2028 election.

The proposals aimed to create maps that would give Democrats an advantage in as many as seven of Colorado’s eight U.S. House districts. In two unanimous rulings, the court said the measures violated Colorado’s single-subject rule for ballot initiatives.

The justices found the proposals went beyond simply creating temporary congressional maps by also changing how, when, and by whom redistricting would be handled. Chief Justice Monica Márquez wrote that the proposals would make sweeping changes to Colorado’s long-established redistricting system, including changes to its timing, criteria, and oversight.

“We conclude that these are distinct and separate subjects,” Márquez wrote in one of the opinions.

“Temporarily allowing mid-decade redistricting is not merely the means to implement or effectuate the Initiatives’ central purpose of adopting a specific new congressional district map for the 2028 and 2030 election cycles,” she added.

She said those changes went well beyond the supporters’ stated goal of adopting temporary congressional maps. Justice Richard Gabriel wrote the unanimous opinion for the Colorado Supreme Court, with the court finding that both measures violated the state constitution’s requirement that ballot initiatives address only one subject.

“To conclude otherwise and to allow initiative proponents to proceed with interlocking measures like those at issue here would allow proponents to achieve indirectly what they could not achieve directly and would endorse an end run around the single subject requirement. This we cannot do,” Gabriel wrote, pertaining to the three ballot measures imposing conditional redistricting.

The proposals came after Democrats pushed to redraw Colorado’s congressional map ahead of the 2028 election, prompting Republicans to introduce competing measures. Colorado currently uses an independent redistricting commission created by voters, which drew the state’s current congressional map after the 2020 census.

Colorado’s congressional delegation is currently split evenly, with four Democrats and four Republicans, and one district seen as competitive. If the Democrat-backed measures had made the ballot and passed, they could have given Democrats an edge in as many as seven of the state’s eight congressional districts during the 2028 and 2030 elections.

The decisions also take Colorado out of the latest fight over congressional maps, which picked up after Republicans in Texas approved new districts and sparked similar efforts in other states.

The campaign behind the measures raised about $2.3 million and spent more than $2 million, most of it on collecting signatures to get the proposals on the ballot. Its biggest donors included the Fairness Project, American Opportunity Action, and a political action committee affiliated with Democrats in the U.S. House.