DENVER (LN) — A federal judge on Monday denied the Colorado Republican Party's emergency bid to bar unaffiliated voters from the June 30 Republican primary, ruling that the request asked the court to grant relief that Colorado law does not permit and, in the alternative, that it ran afoul of the Purcell doctrine.
U.S. District Judge Philip A. Brimmer found that the Party was asking the court to disregard a statutory deadline it never challenged and to order a state-run closed primary that Colorado law does not provide for. He also found, in the alternative, that ordering the Secretary to exclude unaffiliated voters from the Republican primary — less than a month before ballots must be mailed — would create exactly the kind of voter confusion the Supreme Court warned against in Purcell v. Gonzalez, and that the state's election infrastructure simply could not be retooled in time regardless.
The ruling lands in a case the Colorado Republican Party filed in July 2023, challenging the constitutionality of the state's semi-open primary system under Colo. Rev. Stat. § 1-4-702(1). The Party scored a partial win on March 31, when Brimmer found that the statute's requirement that three-quarters of a major party's state central committee vote to opt out of the semi-open primary constitutes a severe burden on associational rights and is unconstitutional. But the Party missed the October 1, 2025 statutory deadline to opt out of the semi-open primary for the 2026 cycle — a deadline Brimmer's March 31 order left intact.
The Party filed its emergency motion on April 20, asking Brimmer to bar Secretary of State Jena Griswold from including unaffiliated voters in the Republican primary ballot. Brimmer was unpersuaded. He found the Party was asking the court to disregard a deadline it never challenged and to order a state-run closed primary that Colorado law does not provide for. Under Proposition 108, which passed in 2016, major parties have two options: a state-run semi-open primary or a privately funded convention or assembly.
The logistics made the request even harder to grant. Colorado's statewide voter registration and election system, known as SCORE, is programmed to send unaffiliated voters ballots from both major parties. The state's Deputy Elections Director, Hilary Rudy, submitted a declaration stating it would take approximately seven months to reprogram SCORE to exclude unaffiliated voters from the Republican primary ballot. The Secretary must certify ballot contents by May 1, the same day SCORE enters a coding blackout during which no changes are introduced to the system. County clerks must transmit mail ballots to overseas and military voters by May 16.
The Party pushed back on Rudy's declaration, arguing the disruption claims were exaggerated and that re-educating election workers on SCORE was "not rocket science" and "would not take months." Brimmer rejected that challenge, finding it was "unsupported by a declaration of a person with personal knowledge."
The Party also argued that minor parties having until April 16 to opt out showed the Secretary could reprogram SCORE in time. Brimmer dispatched that argument too, noting that SCORE is already built to handle minor-party opt-outs because unaffiliated voters are not automatically sent minor-party ballots — a fundamentally different programming situation than the one the Party was asking the state to create for a major-party primary weeks out.
Brimmer also denied, without prejudice as moot, a motion to intervene filed by the National Republican Congressional Committee, Congressman Jeff Hurd, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, Congressman Jeff Crank, and Congressman Gabe Evans, who sought to oppose the emergency motion on the ground that it would exclude unaffiliated voters from the Republican primary "just days before ballots are mailed."
Unaffiliated voters have received primary ballots from both major parties in every primary since Proposition 108 passed a decade ago — a voting expectation the court found the state could not unwind before June 30.