Could an election-reform initiative really help the business community?

To the average business owner struggling to keep up with inflation and new regulations, electoral reform may not seem like an issue that should be at the top of their priority list.

But former DaVita CEO Kent Thiry would beg to differ.

Thiry, no stranger to election fights, is spearheading a ballot initiative this year that would upend the way Coloradans vote in statewide primary and general elections. Proposition 131 is drawing criticism from party leaders, unions and senior groups for being confusing and self-serving to the businessman, ensuring that it will be one of the more talked-about measures on what will be a crowded ballot this fall.

But Thiry said that he believes the measure — formerly known as Initiative 310 before getting its official title this week — should grab special attention from employers who’ve expressed frustration with policies coming from the Capitol in recent years. Business has lost allies on both sides of the aisle as primary elections often tend to produce more extreme candidates chosen by voters in noncompetitive districts, and these changes could serve as an antidote to generate more aisle-crossing winners, he said.

“I don’t care if someone is moderate or liberal or conservative. It’s not that I’m looking for a world where all candidates are in the middle,” Thiry said in an interview this week. “I’m looking for a world where candidates can meet in the middle.”

What the reform measure would do

Under Proposition 131, the current primary system in which voters choose one Democrat and one Republican by voting in one but not both party races would be replaced by a primary in which independents and candidates from all parties compete together. The top four vote-getters in that “jungle primary,” regardless of affiliations, would advance to the general election.

Then, in the general election, voters would rank their candidates first through fourth. When the contender with the lowest vote total is eliminated after each round of balloting, voters who supported that person would see their support transferred instead to their No. 2 choose or to their No. 3 candidate if their No. 2 candidate is eliminated. This would continue until one candidate has secured at least 50% of the vote.

Letting voters advance four candidates to the general election — including, possibly, multiple candidates from one or both major parties — would ensure primary voters don’t leave the general populace just with the choice of two ideologically extreme contenders. While primaries have been open to unaffiliated voters since 2018, participation remains dominated by more liberal and conservative adherents, sometimes leaving the expansive group of middle-of-the-road voters with unappealing choices in November, Thiry said.

Meanwhile, allowing voters to rank candidates ensures that office-seekers must reach out to everyone in their districts rather than just the narrower crowd of backers that they think they’ll need to outpoll the lone candidate from the other party, he argued. By having a chance to be the No. 2 choice of voters, especially those from the other side of the aisle, candidates will have to reach out to a wider swath of individuals and seek to build more consensus in the voter base.

Why Thiry believes reform is needed

Thiry noted that 85% of the state’s legislative districts are considered noncompetitive, with the electoral victor in 54 of the 65 House seats and 31 of the 35 Senate seats winning by 10% or more on the most recent ballot. That, he said, means that some 40% of the voters in 85% of the districts in Colorado — those not voting in the primary of the dominant party — may never get to cast a meaningful ballot in a legislative race.

“Suddenly now a moderate D, as opposed to having to lean toward Bernie Sanders, they can say ‘I’ll pick up a portion of the No. 2 votes,’” Thiry explained. “In the current system, those two candidates lean toward each other and only care about the 60% (of district voters in their own party) … And this new system is what leads businesses to get a much more stable and moderating environment.”

“Unstable” is a fair way to describe the business environment at the Capitol over the past five years. Legislators created new rules affecting employers’ hiring practices, broadening the definition of employer discrimination, expanding paid-sick-leave requirements and boosting environmental regulations in cost-adding ways. And when they couldn’t pass a bill to create a statewide paid-family-leave requirement, they went straight to voters and got their OK.

It’s all about certainty

A 2023 Colorado Chamber of Commerce survey found that regulation was by far the biggest concern of employers and the obstacle that most made them pause plans to expand within this state. In Thiry’s mind, election of candidates who are less worried about primaries from the ideological edges of their parties and more willing to find solutions that please a large swath of voters could lead to more cross-aisle compromise and more regulatory stability.

“Businesses need to know what the rules of the game are going to be with some certainty to take the risk of adding three more people, to take the risk of expanding their store, to take the risk of buying one more truck,” Thiry said. “The more you take the risk of electing a Legislature that is much more volatile, you have a less predictable world. And that means you are not hiring those people or buying that truck or expanding the restaurant.”

Among the many criticisms that opponents of Proposition 131 offer, though, is that the hoped-for moderation from voters will not come to pass. Ellen Dumm, an official with opposition campaign Voter Rights Colorado, pointed to a University of Minnesota study that found no evidence that ranked-choice voting decreased polarization between parties.

Concerns from unions, both parties

Thiry and other proponents counter by pointing to the seven U.S. Senate Republicans who voted most recently to impeach former President Donald Trump. None of the four in states with traditional primary systems sought re-election, with several of them facing censures from their state parties and threats of intraparty election challenges. The three in states with ranked-choice voting and/or jungle primaries — Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — have kept their political careers alive.

Several groups argue also that the ranked-choice voting system will be confusing to voters, particularly older residents and those in historically disadvantaged communities with lower levels of education. Sandra Parker Murray, a representative for Communication Workers of America Local 7777, noted in a recent Legislative Council hearing that Prop 131 would only impact races for U.S. Senate, U.S. House and the Colorado Legislature, leaving voters to have to cast ballots a head-scratchingly different way for president and for local elections.

Dumm said that research has found that up to one-third of voters casting ballots in systems like Proposition 131 proposes don’t rank their choices, leaving their vote essentially uncounted after their first-choice candidate is eliminated. Other studies have found the system decreases turnout in marginalized communities, she added during a Colorado Business Roundtable briefing Thursday that featured both campaigns,.

“It’s not voter-friendly, it’s confusing, it’s expensive,” Dumm said. “Confusion in elections spurs conspiracy theories … It also spurs threats against election officials.”

Other states, cities have tried this reform

Landon Mascarañez, cofounder of the Open System Institute and a supporter of Proposition 131, pushed back that voter participation in Alaska has risen since the state instituted the system. And Amber McReynolds, a former Denver elections director and another supporter, noted during the recent Legislative Council hearing that Boulder pulled off its first ranked-choice mayoral race last year without problems or a litany of complaints.

Leaders of both state parties have been critical, and the Colorado Democratic Party recently voted as an organization to oppose it. Both parties also opposed Thiry’s successful 2016 initiative to open primaries to unaffiliated voters, and Republican leaders continue to challenge the measure in court.

That 2016 measure, along with a separate initiative that year that replaced presidential caucuses with statewide presidential primaries, were Thiry’s first foray into politics, followed by passage of a 2018 initiative to create an independent redistricting commission. He also toyed with running as a Republican for governor in 2018 before deciding against it, and he emphasized in an interview that he has no plans to run in the future.

The former CEO, who has been retired from the corporate world since 2019, defended the impact of his previous efforts as “substantial.” He noted that unaffiliated voters have toggled between primaries, with the majority voting in Democratic contests in 2020 and Republican races in 2022, and they helped to keep election deniers off the general-election ballot two years ago in the GOP primary.

More obstacles sit in proposition’s pathway

Yet, even by the admission of the Proposition 131 campaign, the vast majority of Colorado’s legislative districts remain uncompetitive — one of the primary reasons for this new initiative. Thiry defended the impact of that commission by noting the 50/50 makeup of Congressional District 8, which was only drawn in 2022, and by arguing that there would be even fewer competitive districts without the commission’s efforts.

Even were Proposition 131 to pass, it faces hurdles to being enacted.

Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat who was critical of Thiry’s efforts in an interview with the Colorado Sun, amended an omnibus election cleanup bill late in the 2024 session in a way that would delay implementation of the initiative’s reforms. Specifically, it would require 12 Colorado cities, located in a mix of counties with different population sizes and demographic makeups, to hold ranked-choice elections before the system could be used in state or federal races.

While Thiry criticized that legislative move, he said that Gov. Jared Polis has promised, if Proposition 131 passes, to establish a task force to design an implementation plan and agreed to propose funding in his budget to help clerks prepare to implement changes. Supporters of the initiative, in fact, already have begun reaching out to county clerks and connecting them to national partners who’ve implemented such a system and to cybersecurity experts to help such a transition to be secure and effective, Thiry said.

But for all the work supporters already have done, their biggest task might be to convince voters — particularly business leaders — to care about the initiative in a year when their attention will be on the presidential race and a slew of pivotal legislative contests.