Colorado Republicans on Saturday voted down a proposal to opt out of the 2024 primary election in order to prevent the state’s unaffiliated voters from helping pick GOP nominees.

While a majority of the party’s state central committee meeting in Castle Rock voted to withdraw from the primary, the vote fell far short of the 75% majority required under state law.

The vote was 259 in support of opting out and 143.5 against, for roughly 65% in favor.

That outcome, said GOP Chairman Dave Williams, bolsters a lawsuit filed by the party in federal court seeking to overturn the voter-approved 2016 ballot measure that established the semi-open primary system, which allows Colorado’s nearly 2 million unaffiliated voters to cast ballots in either Republican or Democratic primary elections.

“We all understand that this kind of proves the point of the lawsuit, that the state has imposed upon the Republican Party an unconstitutional threshold, and the numbers bear that out,” Williams told Republicans after announcing the results.

Republicans who want to close the party’s primaries insist that voters who aren’t registered with the party shouldn’t have a say in the party’s nominations, while opponents argue that withdrawing from the primary risks ignoring the wishes of nearly half of state voters who are unaffiliated.

“We do not have time to continue to fail,” central committee member Laurel Imer, a former congressional candidate from Jefferson County, told the crowd. “The reason we continue to lose at the ballot box is we allow watered-down candidates to infiltrate our ballot. That is why Republicans don’t vote.”

According to the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, 47% of the state’s active, registered voters are unaffiliated, 27% are Democrats, and roughly 24% are Republicans, with the remainder belonging to the state’s minor political parties.

Colorado Republicans have considered canceling the primary and instead nominating candidates through the caucus and assembly process every two years since the current primary system went into effect, but each time the party has come up short.

While both major parties initially opposed Proposition 108, since it was adopted by voters, state Democrats haven’t seriously considered scrapping their primary.

Chuck Bonniwell, a leading supporter of the opt-out proposal and member of the state GOP’s executive board, told Colorado Politics after the vote that the results show the party is “moving in the right direction.”

Noting that support among central committee members for closing the party’s primaries has nearly doubled since the last vote two years ago, Bonniwell said he’s confident the party can prove in court that the 75% threshold is unreasonably high.

“So it doesn’t matter what the majority of Republicans want; it’s what a small minority want,” he said. “It didn’t reach 75%, but this party is really turning the right way.”

Many opponents of the opt-out proposal made clear during about an hour of heated debate that they support the state party’s lawsuit, which seeks to block unaffiliated voters from taking part in both major parties’ primaries.

Vera Ortegon, one of Colorado’s Republican National Committee members, said she is “very much for a closed primary,” but didn’t support the party’s plans to cancel the primary and run its own operation.

“The way to regain that status should be at the courtroom, not in this room,” she said.

“I’m opposed to the opt-out for quite a number of reasons,” said Delta County Republican Chairman David Bradford. “I fully support Republicans picking their own candidates. The lawsuit is what we need to be promoting.”

Kevin McCarney, a former Mesa County GOP chairman, said that canceling the state-run primary would disenfranchise the state’s nearly 1 million Republicans.

“You cannot, cannot take the vote away from the people – the Republican people who sent you here as representatives,” McCarney said, adding: “I am appalled at the contempt that this board had for rural Colorado – it is unbelievable.”

Larry Alan, a central committee member from Jefferson County, argued that the current primary system has led to Republican nominees who don’t represent the party’s principles.

“The opposition used a statewide initiative to overwhelm our majority by using unaffiliate votes and Democrat votes to overwhelm to handcuff us,” he said. “We need to get these handcuffs off. I ask this body to stop complying with our enslavement.”