Colorado voters on Tuesday appeared to reject a sweeping plan to overhaul the state’s election system from some of the state’s richest and most influential political donors.

Proposal 131The ballot measure, backed by the group Colorado Voters First, was on track to be rejected by voters as of 12:08 a.m. Wednesday; 55.4% opposed and 44.6% in favor. The results are not final.

This measure proposed eliminating party primaries for most state and federal offices, replacing them with “all-candidate” primaries for each race, and established the ranked-choice voting system for general elections.

The Colorado measure was one of six on the 2024 ballot funded by Unite America, a nonprofit that supported a successful effort to install such a system in Alaska in 2020. The group is chaired by Kent Thiry, the former CEO of the Denver-based company. DaVita, the dialysis services company that previously sponsored successful efforts in Colorado to open primary elections and create independent redistricting commissions.

Thiry and other advocates, including Gov. Jared Polis and U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, argued that ending partisan primaries would reduce polarization and political dysfunction. Colorado Voters First Get Over $16 Million contributions The list of donors includes Thiry, Unite America, Walmart heir Ben Walton, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s daughter-in-law Kathryn Murdoch.

Critics of Proposition 131 argued that it would privilege wealthy candidates and diminish the value of grassroots campaigns. Both the Colorado Democratic Party and the Colorado Republican Party opposed the measure.

But organized opposition was inadequate in the face of an extensive and well-connected campaign in support of the measure. Colorado Voters Rights, a left-leaning issue committee, raised nearly $500,000 to campaign against the measure. First Choice Counts, an opposition campaign with Republican ties, raised even less, reporting just $8,000 in donations.

Some local election officials also expressed doubts about the enforceability of some of Proposition 131’s provisions and deadlines.

Ranked-choice voting, also known as instant runoff voting, is a method in which voters rank as many or as few as they want from four candidates; Candidates who receive the fewest first-place votes are eliminated until one candidate achieves a majority. Variants of ranked-choice voting systems have been proposed and adopted in the United States for more than a century, and the system is already in use at the local level in a handful of Colorado communities, including Boulder, which held its first ranked-choice voting election last year. .

A newer idea was the elimination of partisan primaries in favor of an all-candidate primary, sometimes known as a “jungle” primary. Currently, only California and Washington state hold jungle primaries for congressional and state legislative elections, with the top two candidates from those primaries advancing to a neck-and-neck general election.

Unite America’s model combines the two ideas into the first four systems. Alaska passed a ballot measure adopting the model in 2020 and became the first state to hold an election under the Unite America model in 2022.

The system was credited with helping elect Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat to represent the state in the House in 50 years by defeating former Gov. Sarah Palin and further electoral defeats of moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski. conservative challenger.

But those results helped fuel backlash against the new system, especially among many Alaska Republicans who put the repeal law on the ballot this year.