For a majority of Coloradans, Jena Griswold is not their first choice for attorney general. Nor is she likely their second or third choice. But she is almost certain to win the Democratic primary on Tuesday and cruise to victory in November.
It is the exact reason Colorado should adopt ranked choice voting.
The AG race provides a great example. Griswold is likely to win the primary with a strong plurality — I’m going to guess somewhere in the low-to-mid 40s. That means she won’t even be the first choice for most of the people in her own party.
The problem is that there are three other candidates, with stronger legal backgrounds, who will split the remaining vote between themselves.
Michael Dougherty has prosecuted thousands of cases as a district attorney and deputy attorney general. David Seligman has made a career suing businesses that take advantage of consumers. Hetal Doshi held a high position in the U.S. Department of Justice, charged with taking on massive corporations.
Griswold has maybe litigated one lawsuit once, a decade and a half ago.
Her only real qualification has been running another, smaller statewide office as the Secretary of State. And even then, she has not done so without significant controversy. She has ground through staff, compromised the office with her political rhetoric, leaked passwords online and otherwise been a lackluster leader.
That has not stopped her from trying to rewrite her history. For example, she claimed to have argued the Trump ballot case before the U.S. Supreme Court before having to walk back that statement under scrutiny. Given that I actually filed that complaint, am admitted to the Supreme Court bar (she is not), had my name on every last pleading and ended up with a SCOTUS sketch, I took particular offense to those claims.
To the best of my recollection, Griswold was most animated about the caption change between the Colorado Supreme Court (Anderson v. Griswold) and SCOTUS (Trump v. Anderson). She wanted her name emblazoned on the case for eternity.
Credit where it is due, Griswold has been an ardent defender of voting rights and free and safe elections. She has never wavered from that position. Why would she? It has been a path to her most sought-after ambitions, namely getting herself television hits on various cable networks over the past eight years.
If the candidates’ resumes were put on paper in a blind vote, Griswold’s would be lucky to get 1%.
But that is not how our election system works. Instead, the top vote getter will become the nominee while all the others go home. And Griswold can rely on a strong base of support and name identification as major advantages. Both have helped her attain a third, critical campaign necessity: money. She has easily outpaced her opponents, raising almost a million dollars more than each of her opponents.
In a one-on-one race, that might not be enough. Her advantages would be muted and a challenger could consolidate the strength of all the other candidates. Look no further than the Colorado gubernatorial race. Recent polls show current AG Phil Weiser has caught and surpassed U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, the longtime front-runner and presumed winner.
But if Weiser had two other strong candidates splitting the anti-Bennet vote? The only real question would be whom would Bennet choose to replace himself (a question we still don’t know now)?
That is the situation in the AG race. I know excellent lawyers and activists who ardently support each of the three candidates. And almost all say they would support any of the other two over Griswold. It is effectively a mutual admiration society that will end in mutually assured destruction. I doubt any of the three will eclipse 25% of the vote.
And it puts voters in an impossible situation. Personally, I represented an independent expenditure committee to help one candidate, but ended up voting for the candidate whose snowball would melt the slowest before it evaporated. It is frustrating and demoralizing.
But if we had a ranked choice system, voters would not need to play those kinds of games. They could vote for the candidate they like the most and then list their second and third choices. As clerks tallied ballots, it would lead to an instant runoff. If no candidate received 50% plus 1 of the vote, the lowest voter getter would be dropped and the second choices for those ballots would be tallied. And so on. Eventually one candidate would emerge with the magic number.
I have advocated for similar changes for years. I liked the Alaska system, which combines ranked choice voting with a single primary for all parties. I supported Proposition 131 which would have brought that system to Colorado. I have said the Denver mayoral race would benefit from changes including ranked choice voting.
Shoot, even Republicans might agree if they end up with a conman at the top of the ticket while the (somewhat) less clownish candidates end up splitting the anti-Marx vote.
Whoever wins this week, Colorado is losing. It is losing a chance to have its real voice heard. And until we adopt electoral reforms like ranked choice voting, we will continue losing.
Mario Nicolais is an attorney and columnist who writes on law enforcement, the legal system, health care and public policy. Follow him on BlueSky: @MarioNicolais.bsky.social.
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