May 11, 2026 11:51 AM UTC

Bottoms, Hanks Throw Hail Mary To Keep Unaffiliated Voters Off Ballot

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Ernest Luning reports for the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog formerly known as the Colorado Statesman, three Republican candidates with the most to lose from allowing unaffiliated voters to participate in the rapidly approaching June 30th Republican primary elections are taking one more stab through the courts at excluding them before ballots go out in one month:

Three Republican candidates in Colorado filed a lawsuit in Denver District Court this week seeking to prevent unaffiliated voters from participating in next month’s GOP primary, arguing that the state’s semi-open primary system violates their constitutional rights by forcing Republicans to let outsiders help choose the party’s nominees.

Ron Hanks, Scott Bottoms and David Willson are asking the court to grant a preliminary injunction barring state election officials from mailing Republican primary ballots to unaffiliated voters for the June 30 election. They’re also asking the judge to declare the voter-approved law establishing Colorado’s primary system unconstitutional.

Hanks, a former legislator, is challenging Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd in the 3rd Congressional District, while Bottoms, a state representative from Colorado Springs, is one of three GOP candidates for governor, and Willson is running in a two-way primary for attorney general.

This latest request to exclude unaffiliated voters from this year’s Republican primary comes after a similar attempt by the state GOP was rejected by the courts late last month. That attempt was also opposed by Republican incumbent members of Congress, who argued that protecting unaffiliated primary voters was in “national political committee’s concrete, partisan interests.” While it’s likely that Bottoms’ and Hanks’ challenge will meet the same fate being too close to the election to make this huge change without mass confusion and disruption, there remains the original court ruling at the end of March that the requirement in Proposition 108 that 75% of a party’s central committee vote to opt out of unaffiliated participation was an undue burden.

So while the fringe Republicans who think they can win if they kick ideologically impure unaffiliated voters out of the primary are likely to lose this year on practical grounds, at some point they’re likely to get their way. The court didn’t spell out what the threshold should be for a vote to opt out, only that 75% was too high. If Colorado Republicans are ever again able to achieve a level of organizational cohesion from which they can make any decision, which is a whole other blog post as readers know, this is going to be one of the fundamental questions they must reckon with.

The reason that Democrats welcome unaffiliated voters is the same reason Republicans want to exclude them. Especially in Colorado where they are now a majority, unaffiliated participation in primaries produces more electable candidates for the general election. Mainstream candidates in both parties welcome unaffiliated voters, while the fringes fear them.

It just happens to be Colorado Republicans, where the fringe is in control, who are proving it.