The Colorado Supreme Court unanimously shot down a package of ballot initiatives on Monday, June 29, that sought to redraw the state’s congressional maps in favor of Democrats. 

Coloradans for a Level Playing Field, a group formed earlier this year to support the redistricting effort, had been in the midst of gathering signatures to place the proposals on the November ballot. 

The proposals sought to temporarily replace the state’s current congressional map, which was drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission in 2021, with a new map for the 2028 and 2030 elections. The new map would have made Democrats the favorites to win seven of the state’s eight congressional districts, up from the four they currently hold. 

That includes the 3rd Congressional District, which is currently represented by Republican Jeff Hurd and encompasses much of western and southern Colorado. 

The redistricting group had also been pushing for a ballot measure that would have moved the state’s independent redistricting commission from the state constitution to state statute. This would have allowed the commission and its maps to be changed through state legislation, rather than a constitutional amendment, which requires approval from voters. 

The measures were tied to one another, with each taking effect only if the other passed. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that doing so violated a provision in the state constitution that prohibits ballot measures from encompassing multiple subjects. 

“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,” wrote Justice Richard Gabriel in one of the court’s opinions. 

Gabriel continued that 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.”

The court’s decision is a win for Colorado Republicans, who challenged the legality of the ballot proposals. 

Coloradans for a Level Playing Field raised $2,247,165 and spent $2,023,379 on its effort to gather signatures and place the redistricting measures on this year’s ballot, according to filings with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office. 

Much of the campaign’s funding came from The Fairness Project, a nonprofit that supports ballot initiatives focused on progressive causes in states across the country. Funding also came from the Democratic-aligned advocacy group American Opportunity Action and the nonprofit House Majority Forward, a groupfocused on electing Democrats to Congress that has ties to U.S. House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat. 

In a statement, Coloradans for a Level Playing Field spokesperson Curtis Hubbard said, “The success of this partisan attempt to sideline Coloradans from responding to Donald Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade redistricting scheme is disappointing.”

He added, “While Trump and his MAGA allies regularly sidestep the law and ignore voters, efforts to respond have once again been dealt a legal setback over a technicality.”

Coloradans for a Level Playing Field had said a new map was needed to counteract President Donald Trump’s push to redraw congressional districts across the country in favor of Republicans. 

Texas last year was the first state to redraw its map at Trump’s urging, with the state legislature giving Republicans an opportunity to net up to five additional seats in Congress in November. California voters later responded by passing their own map, which could give Democrats in the state five new seats next year. 

Several more states have since jumped into the nation’s redistricting war, with the vast majority of new maps being approved by Republican-controlled legislatures. 

A map approved by voters in Virginia that would have netted up to four congressional seats for Democrats was struck down by the state’s highest court. In April, the U.S. The Supreme Court in April ruled against a Louisiana map that was drawn to include a second majority-black district that favored Democrats. The court’s ruling also repealed elements of the Voting Rights Act that governed how states ensure fair congressional representation for racial minorities, which could pave the way for more states — particularly in the South — to redraw their maps.