DENVER–Colorado voters will decide in November on a measure that seeks to put guardrails on how congressional maps are drawn in the state.
Backers of Initiative #256, which amends the state Constitution, easily cleared the petitioning threshold, submitting over 185,000 signatures from Colorado voters, of which over 141,000 were deemed valid, the secretary of state’s office said on Monday. That includes the 2 percent of registered voters from each of Colorado’s 35 state senate districts needed for constitutional measures.
If passed, Initiative #256 would ban congressional redistricting intended to favor a political party and require the state’s redistricting commission and Supreme Court to approve any off-cycle changes. Typically, states redraw districts every 10 years based on updated U.S. Census data.
The measure was initially filed by the conservative advocacy group Advance Colorado in response to a trio of failed redistricting measures designed to benefit Democrats, who sought to counteract redistricting in Republican-controlled states ahead of the midterm elections.
“The practice of political gerrymandering, whereby congressional districts are purposefully drawn to favor one political party or incumbent politician over another, must end,” the measure reads in part.
The three failed initiatives pushed by Democrat-backed groups – Initiatives 240, 241 and 242 – would have redrawn congressional maps in 2028 and 2030, bypassing the state’s independent commission, but the Colorado Supreme Court shot down the measures based on the state’s single-subject rule in June, Complete Colorado reported at the time.
“When a measure’s effectiveness is expressly contingent on the passage of a separate and independent measure, the measure contains multiple subjects, just as if the measures were combined into one,” Justice Richard Gabriel wrote about two of the measures (241 and 242), which were pushed by the group Coloradans for a Level Playing Field.
Chief Justice Monica Márquez, in a separate ruling on Initiative 240, wrote that suspending the independent commission would represent a “seismic shift” to the state’s constitutionally enshrined redistricting process.
Advance Colorado argues their measure will give communities priority over political parties.
“Initiative 256 puts exactly what Colorado voters want in the state constitution — a prohibition on any mid-cycle maps from being drawn to benefit a specific political party,” Advance Colorado Executive Vice President Kristi Burton Brown told Complete Colorado. “Instead, voters want independent maps that prioritize their communities.”
Colorado’s current maps were redrawn in 2021 by the Colorado Independent Congressional Redistricting Committee, which was established after voters passed Proposition Y in 2018
Constitutional amendments require a super-majority 55 percent-plus-one of the vote to pass.
Colorado’s general election is Nov. 3.
