The staffer's question was simple. Blunt, even.
Proposed Article V, Section 451 of the new initiative said both the Colorado Senate and House of Representatives shall be elected by a system of proportional representation. Proposed Article V, Section 452 — just one section later — said the Senate shall be elected to represent single member districts.
So: how, exactly, do you achieve proportional representation in a district that only elects one person?
The answer came back without hesitation. "It does not," the proponent said. "That would need to be changed."
That exchange — somewhere near the midpoint of a two-hour procedural hearing on April 20, 2026 — captured the essential story of the day. Three ambitious ballot initiatives designed to overhaul Colorado's entire electoral architecture had arrived at the state legislature's formal review process carrying a remarkable volume of internal contradictions, citation errors, and unresolved drafting questions. No votes were taken. Nobody got thrown out of the room. But the gap between the vision and the legal text was, by any measure, significant.
What These Initiatives Would Actually Do
To understand why this hearing mattered, it helps to know what the proponents are actually trying to build.
Proposed Initiative 2027-2028 #3 and its companion Initiative #4 would amend both the Colorado Constitution and state statutes to mandate proportional representation for elections to the state Senate and House of Representatives, with related provisions governing statewide offices, U.S. congressional races, and local bodies like school boards and county governments. The two initiatives are nearly identical in purpose, with one key difference: Initiative #4 establishes pick-one ballots with an open list proportional representation tally as the default voting method, and creates a commission to determine which specific flavor of open list proportional representation best serves Colorado voters.
Proposed Initiative #5 takes a parallel but distinct path: ranked choice voting. It would require ranked voting methods for statewide offices, eliminate primary elections in favor of assembly, convention, or petition nominations, and allow the University of Colorado Board of Regents, statutory counties, and school boards to adopt ranked voting on their own.
Taken together, the three initiatives represent one of the most sweeping proposed transformations of Colorado's electoral system in modern history — a full-scale attempt to move the state away from winner-take-all, single-member-district elections toward systems designed to more closely reflect the ideological diversity of voters.
The proponents — Patricia Fichter, Linda Templin, and Josh Wallen — were the only participants at the hearing. No opponents appeared. Staff members Hamza, representing Colorado Legislative Council Staff, and Jed Franklin of the Office of Legislative Legal Services, led the review.
A Document Full of Self-Contradictions
The hearing is a required procedural step under Colorado law. Before proponents can begin collecting signatures to place an initiative on the ballot, legislative staff review the proposed text, identify drafting problems, and ask questions to clarify intent. The goal is not to approve or reject — it's to help proponents understand what their own document actually says, legally.
On April 20th, that process produced a lengthy catalogue of problems.
Beyond the Senate proportional-representation-versus-single-member-district contradiction, staff identified an amending clause in Section 5 of Initiatives 3 and 4 that referenced Article 5, Section 462 of the Colorado Constitution — but showed no new or stricken text in that section. The proponent acknowledged this was unintentional: "That was not intentional and that will need an update."
There was a grammatical error in Section 3 that, read literally, would have severed the joint election of the Governor and Lieutenant Governor — requiring them to run in separate single-member district races. "No, it is not" the intended effect, the proponent said flatly. "That is a grammatical error." Staff, consistent with their role, noted the problem and declined to rewrite it: "We don't want to write the initiative."
And the commission created by Initiatives 3 and 4 to oversee balloting method decisions? It had an even number of members — meaning any tied vote would leave Colorado's new electoral framework in legal limbo. Staff asked what happens if the commission ties. The proponent's response was brisk: get an odd number of members.
The Constitutional Trap Hidden in a Rule Citation
Initiative #5 had its own set of problems, and one of them carried unusually high constitutional stakes.
The initiative referenced "Rule 26" as the ranked voting tally method — a rule that staff identified as potentially 8 CCR 1505-1, a Secretary of State election rule. The proponent confirmed it had started as a Secretary of State rule, noted that "it got incorporated into the body of CRS," and described it as "the gold standard nationally for how you write this."
Staff's concern wasn't about the substance of Rule 26. It was about what happens when you embed a regulatory rule directly into the state Constitution.
"If the rule changed just as opposite does from time to time," staff explained, "it would be incorporated into the Constitution that change. So you wouldn't have any control over what ended up happening."
In other words: if Rule 26 were ever amended by the Secretary of State — even in a small technical way — that amendment would automatically become part of the Colorado Constitution, without any vote of the people. The proponent's response: "Got it. Okay. Thank you." The fix, flagged for written follow-up, would involve either citing the full regulatory identifier explicitly or porting the entire text of the rule into the initiative.
Federal Law, Eight Congressional Seats, and a Math Problem
The most legally complex exchange of the hearing involved federal law and Colorado's eight U.S. House seats.
Initiatives 3 and 4 propose that U.S. House representatives be elected proportionally in three-to-five-member districts — "to the extent permitted by federal law." Staff cited 2 U.S.C. § 2, which generally requires states to establish single-member districts for U.S. House elections. The initiatives carve out two single-member districts for geographic exceptions, leaving six remaining seats.
Staff did the arithmetic out loud: if you reserve two single-member seats, you have six left. The proponent confirmed the intent was to eventually move those six seats to proportional multi-member districts once federal law permits. But staff pressed further: what happens if Colorado gains or loses congressional seats after a future census? Who decides how to redraw the proportional districts then?
The proponent acknowledged the nonpartisan redistricting board would need explicit directions in the text — "you're right, it does need further direction to the district and committee" — and flagged it for written follow-up.
Staff also raised a Voting Rights Act concern: if a federal court ruled that Colorado's multi-member proportional system violated the federal Voting Rights Act for specific demographic communities, would the constitutional language prohibit the state from complying with that court order? The proponent suggested broadening the relevant provision to allow "other proportional methods as determined by a court" — language flexible enough to accommodate a judicial remedy without blowing up the entire framework.
Primaries, Parties, and the Politics Underneath
Not every exchange was about technical errors. Some touched on the deeper political philosophy driving the effort.
Initiative #5 would eliminate primary elections in favor of assembly, convention, or petition nominations — a significant structural change for Colorado's political parties. Staff asked what purpose that provision served. The proponent's answer revealed the ideological architecture beneath the legal text.
"It makes the parties a little bit stronger because then they can say, well, this is our platform. So if you're not trying to further our platform, do you belong on our party line? Or maybe you need to petition on and not use party resources to do stuff that is not what the party's planning to do."
The argument, in short: ranked choice voting makes primaries redundant as a vote-splitting prevention mechanism, and eliminating them actually restores party discipline rather than weakening it.
Staff also asked about the meaning of "will of the voters" in Section 7 of Initiative #4 — specifically whether it meant a simple majority. The proponent said yes, and agreed to replace the phrase with cleaner statutory language. Staff suggested something like "a majority of voters" or "majority of the electorate." "That's what we're trying to get at," staff said. "It just says the will of the voters, and we're like, oh, what does that mean?"
A Long To-Do List, and a 2032 Target
By the time the hearing wrapped up, the proponents had committed to an extensive written follow-up memo — more than twenty discrete corrections and clarifications spanning all three initiatives.
The target implementation date for Initiatives 3 and 4 is 2032, the proponent confirmed — the first election to which the proportional representation system is meant to apply. Initiative #5's ranked choice provisions are aimed at 2033, though the proponent said they would "get the exact date."
The commission created by Initiatives 3 and 4 still needs clearly defined member qualifications, a selection mechanism, a deadline to convene and issue its determination, and — critically — an odd number of members. The nonpartisan redistricting board needs guidance on congressional seat reallocation. The Rule 26 citation needs resolution. The Governor-Lieutenant Governor grammatical error needs fixing. The amending clause for Section 5 needs text. The Section 45 citation in Initiative #5 needs to be reconciled with the Section 10 head note that actually appears in the document.
None of this is fatal to the effort — this is exactly what review and comment hearings are designed to surface. But the volume of errors, and their occasionally fundamental nature, underscored how technically demanding it is to rewrite an electoral system from scratch in constitutional text.
What Comes Next — and Why It Matters
This hearing produced no votes, no drama, and no opposition. The next steps belong entirely to the proponents: fix the errors, clarify the language, submit written memos, and eventually return with cleaner documents before beginning the signature-gathering process.
But the stakes are not abstract. If some version of these initiatives eventually reaches the Colorado ballot and passes, the state's entire system for electing its 100-member General Assembly — and potentially its congressional delegation — would shift away from winner-take-all elections toward proportional or ranked-choice systems. Millions of Colorado voters would cast ballots in a fundamentally different way. Parties would nominate candidates differently. Independent and third-party candidates could gain structural footholds that the current system makes nearly impossible to hold.
If the initiatives die in the drafting process — or fail to gather enough signatures, or lose at the ballot — Colorado's elections continue on their current architecture, and the proportional representation movement in the state starts over.
Right now, the proponents have a long memo to write.