Colorado’s first-ever citizens’ redistricting commissions are one step closer to being constituted and beginning the once-in-a-decade work of redrawing Colorado’s legislative and congressional districts, as the pool of potential citizen-commissioners is narrowed. 

Later this year, two groups of 12 non-politicians will redraw Colorado’s political lines, after Colorado voters approved a ballot measure that took the remapping powers away from state lawmakers.

Thousands of Coloradans applied. Some were eliminated from the applicant pool because they didn’t meet specific requirements to serve on the commission.

On Jan. 8 and Jan. 12 the Colorado Legislative Council, joined by a panel of retired state judges, performed a computerized random selection of several hundred Coloradans from thousands of qualified applicants to be advanced through the commissioner selection process. 

The randomly selected applicants will next be reviewed by the retired judges, who will by mid-February move forward 50 Democrats, 50 Republicans and 50 unaffiliated applicants for each commission. Two Democrats, two Republicans and two unaffiliated applicants will be randomly selected from the 150 to become commissioners. 

Then Legislative leaders from each party review the applicants and select 40 partisan applicants to move forward. The panel of retired judges will then review and select four of the partisan applicants to become commissioners. Finally, two more unaffiliated applicants will be randomly selected from the original pool of unaffiliated applicants. 

Only 437 qualified unaffiliated voters applied to be on the congressional commission, and only 250 qualified Republican voters and 337 qualified unaffiliated voters applied for the legislative commission, so those categories did not require a random selection to narrow them yet. 

The plan laid out by Legislative Council staff would have the congressional commissioners selected in early-March and the legislative commissioners selected in mid-March. 

The U.S. Census Bureau has planned to distribute the 2020 census data to redistricting bodies around the end of March.

Complete lists of the applicants who were advanced through the random selection step, as well as those who didn’t meet the commissioner qualifications, is available on the Colorado Redistricting Commission website.