Colorado’s highest court has put a stop to a set of ballot measures that would have redrawn the state’s congressional districts along partisan lines, blocking what critics called an attempt to game the political map ahead of future elections.
The Colorado Supreme Court reviewed five related proposals that were aimed at reshaping the state’s U.S. House districts for the 2028 election cycle. Three of the measures would have handed Democrats a dominant edge in the congressional map, while two Republican-backed alternatives would have nudged the map slightly toward the GOP compared to current boundaries.
The court found that the measures tried to accomplish too much in a single stroke, combining changes to Colorado’s redistricting process with the approval of entirely new political maps. The justices ruled that doing so, whether through one proposal or a set of linked measures, violated the Colorado Constitution’s single subject requirement.
As originally reported, Justice Richard L. Gabriel wrote in the June 29 opinion: “To conclude otherwise and 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 ruling drops into the middle of a national redistricting battle playing out across the country. Both parties have been aggressively redrawing congressional maps in states they control, all before the next census.
Texas redrew its House districts last year, encouraged by President Donald Trump, giving Republicans a shot at picking up five additional seats. California voters then approved a ballot measure this spring that created five additional Democratic-leaning districts. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 10 states have completed mid-decade redistricting so far, with more GOP-led states leading the charge.
Courts have stepped in to settle the disputes in several states. Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment creating Democratic-leaning districts, but the state Supreme Court struck it down in May. In Utah, the state Supreme Court upheld an order to redraw boundaries to include one Democratic-leaning district. And following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, multiple Southern states redrew maps to eliminate districts with large Black populations.
In Colorado, the five proposed measures fell into two categories. Two were broad proposals that would have amended the state constitution to permit mid-decade redistricting, bypass the independent redistricting commission, and lock in new maps for 2028 and 2030. One would have produced a 7-1 Democratic advantage; the other a 5-3 Republican edge.
The remaining three proposals tried to achieve the same outcome through incremental steps, first moving redistricting commission rules out of the state constitution, then installing new maps contingent on that change passing.
The Colorado Supreme Court rejected both approaches in two separate decisions, closing the door, at least for now, on dragging the state into the broader partisan redistricting arms race.