There are a number of Democratic and Republican voters in Colorado that are making it increasingly harder for candidates from the two parties to gather petition signatures to get on the primary ballot.
The Democratic candidates must collect signatures from voters that are registered as Democrats to make the ballot. The Republican candidates also need signatures from voters that are registered as Republicans.
The petition signatures are from unaffiliated voters who can cast ballots in the major parties’ primaries. As of March 1, this made up 50% of the state’s 4 million active registered voters.
This could eventually mean that only the candidates with deep financial resources, who are able to pay firms a high premium to gather signatures, will be able to make the ballot through the signature route.
The state legislative candidates are starting to feel the change because the shifting voter registration numbers have presented signature-gathering problems for candidates up and down the ballot.
Each of the Democrats and Republicans running for the state House and Senate must collect 1,000 signatures from voters in their parties to make the ballot, and they have a much smaller pool of voters to collect from. The house districts each have about 65,000 voters in them, while each Senate district has about 120,000 voters.
The unaffiliated voters make up the largest share of the active, registered electorate in all but two of Colorado’s 100 state House and Senate districts. This means that some major party candidates may have a few thousand voters they can collect signatures from.
Each congressional district has candidates who must collect 1,500 signatures from voters in their party to make the ballot, which has about 500,000 registered voters. The people who are unaffiliated make up the largest share of the electorate in each of Colorado’s eight congressional districts, but the bigger pool of voters makes collecting signatures from the shrinking share of partisans less of a challenge.
When people are getting signatures, they usually are done outside grocery stores and other high-traffic areas. If you were in Denver, you would easily find Democratic voters, and in Colorado Springs, you could easily find Republicans in the area, but that’s no longer a reliable strategy because there are so many voters who are unaffiliated, and they probably don’t even know it.
A 2019 law is where people are automatically registered to vote when they have an interaction with the Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles.
A decade ago there were 35% of the state’s 2.91 million active people, while 33% were Republicans and 32% were Democrats.
One of the state legislative candidates had failed spectacularly in his signature-gathering efforts this year. There were just 29 of 1,635 signatures on his campaign submitted and accepted when reviewed by the Colorado Secretary of State’s office. There were dozens of people who signed his petition that were not registered as Democrats, and the signatures were then rejected.
The campaigns have shifted to targeting partisan voters at their homes, but that has problems too. Doorbell cameras, like Ring and Nest, mean that the homeowners can screen who is knocking at their door before they decide to answer.
Statehouse candidates, who can only collect donations of up to $450 per person, don’t typically raise the kind of money it now takes to pay for all of their signature gathering.
In 2024, voters rejected a Malloy measure that would have let unaffiliated voters sign candidate petitions. The change was tucked into Proposition 131, which would have also moved the state to an all-candidate primary system where the top four vote-getters advance to ranked-choice general elections.
