A group of Colorado Republicans voted Saturday to remove Dave Williams as chairman of the state party at a meeting denounced by Williams and his allies as “fraudulent” and “illegal.”

Republicans cheered when results were announced at a church in Brighton, where Williams’ opponents gathered in defiance of state GOP warnings that the proceedings lacked authority and would be ignored.

About 88% of the 182.16 central committee members in attendance voted to oust Williams, easily clearing the 60% required under state party bylaws to remove an officer. (Some members hold fractional votes.)

Williams did not attend the meeting.

Republicans also voted to fire Williams’ lieutenants, Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman and Anna Ferguson, the state party secretary, by nearly identical margins.

After the series of votes, central committee members elected former El Paso County GOP Chairman Eli Bremer to chair the party and voted in former Routt County Treasurer Brita Horn as vice chair. Kevin McCarney, a former Mesa County party chair, was elected secretary.

The meeting came 48 days before mail ballots are scheduled to start going out to Colorado voters for the general election, when Republicans hope to make up ground after suffering historic losses at the ballot box in recent years.

Williams and the state GOP dismissed Saturday’s meeting as a “fraudulent” event convened by a “fringe element of our State Party” in an email from the party that went out to Republicans after the votes.

“These people are definitely making things up as they go along, but we won’t be deterred,” the party said in the email, which added that the meeting’s organizers have “proven that they do not care about electing Trump this November.”

Williams told Colorado Politics after the votes that he plans to rely on a ruling issued by a parliamentarian for the Republican National Committee, who said the meeting called by Williams’ critics was “illegitimate and any action taken there was or will be null and void.”

Earlier this week, the meeting’s organizers released a ruling from a different parliamentarian who has also worked with the RNC, who said Saturday’s meeting was called according to party bylaws and appeared to be qualified to conduct official business.

Republicans on both sides said Saturday that they expect the dispute won’t be resolved quickly, with the national party potentially called upon to sort things out.

Bremer said he plans to hire an executive director and open an interim party headquarters on Monday.

“Folks, we’ve got just over 50 days that this is going on,” he said, referring to the time remaining before Coloradans start casting ballots.

“After this meeting, we will endorse every Republican in this state and start working with them,” Bremer said. “We will call the RNC to reopen Colorado for business. We are ready to go, and the rest of the country is excited to help out with this.”

Todd Watkins, the El Paso County GOP’s vice chair, told Colorado Politics that he issued a formal call for a meeting of the state party’s central committee after Williams and other state GOP officers failed to comply with a petition he submitted in June demanding that the party schedule a meeting within 30 days to consider removing Williams.

Williams and his supporters have contended that the petition didn’t meet requirements, and last month the state party’s executive committee declared it “null and void.”

A motion passed by central committee members at Saturday’s meeting, however, overruled the executive committee’s decision, paving the way for the later vote to unseat Williams.

A majority of Colorado’s Republican congressional nominees earlier this week called for Williams to resign or be removed. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, the lone Republican incumbent seeking reelection to the U.S. House this year, issued a separate demand last month asking Williams to support GOP candidates or face removal by the party’s state central committee.

Following the meeting in Brighton, six of the eight Republicans running for congressional seats in Colorado and state Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen congratulated Bremer, Horn and McCarney and encouraged party members to treat them as the state party’s leaders.

In addition to Lundeen, those signing the statement were U.S. House nominees Valdamar Archuleta in the 1st District, Marshall Dawson in the 2nd District, Jeff Hurd in the 3rd District, Jeff Crank in the 5th District, John Fabbricatore in the 6th District and state Rep. Gabe Evans in the 8th District.

“We urge all Colorado Republicans to join us in recognizing the legitimacy of today’s election and work toward a seamless and successful transition of leadership,” the Repubican candidates said. “We look forward to working with our new leaders to ensure a successful 2024 election.”

A spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee also hailed the turnover in state party leadership.

“It is our understanding that today’s Colorado GOP vote is in accordance with party bylaws,” the NRCC’s Delanie Bomar said in a text message. “We will recognize the new party leadership and look forward to working with them to grow the Republican House majority.”

Saturday’s meeting was the latest in a series of disputed central committee meetings called by feuding factions of the state party, including a sparsely attended huddle under a bridge in the southwest corner of the state called last month by Williams’ backers, who told Republicans not to attend.

Williams and his lieutenants maintain that an upcoming state central committee meeting they’ve called for Aug. 31 in Castle Rock is the only legitimate meeting on the books. This week, they urged Republicans to skip Saturday’s meeting and insisted that any business conducted at the meeting wouldn’t be recognized.

In late July, Watkins and other organizers of the move to replace Williams cancelled a meeting they’d called at the church in Brighton where Saturday’s vote took place after a district court judge issued a temporary restraining order sought by Williams and the Colorado Republican Party.

Instead, the Williams critics who called the derailed meeting announced they would instead hold a “rally” at the same location, where county party officers and candidates took turns at the microphone to air complaints about state party leadership.

Arapahoe County District Court Judge Thomas W. Henderson reversed his restraining order days later, ruling that he had issued the initial order based on inaccurate information submitted by Williams. Citing state law and prior court rulings, Henderson ruled that the courts didn’t have jurisdiction over the internal party dispute.

The meeting in Brighton on Saturday took place days after Henderson rebuffed a request by Williams and the state party to issue another injunction while the case was under appeal, arguing in part that replacing GOP leadership in the middle of an election would sow chaos and handicap the party’s efforts to elect Republicans.

Williams appealed the district court judge’s earlier ruling this week and asked for an emergency injunction from the Colorado Court of Appeals, but by Saturday morning, the appeals court hadn’t responded to the motion, effectively allowing the meeting to proceed.

Watkins said after Saturday’s meeting that Williams’ reaction didn’t appear to line up with the expensive legal challenge the state party mounted against his opponents.

“If this was laughable, if this was obsolete, then why drag it through the courts?” Watkins said. “Why not just let us have this and then take legal measures. But to spend that much time, effort and, ostensibly, money on something he thought was laughable seems to belie that.”

Added Watkins: “We did what we knew we had to do. It’s up to the body to decide this, so we wanted to put this before the body to make the decision.” 

Critics charge that Williams, a former state lawmaker from Colorado Springs, used party resources to support his’ unsuccessful congressional campaign in the El Paso County-based 5th Congressional District.

Making his second run for the seat held by retiring U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, Williams lost the GOP primary to Crank, a conservative operative and former radio host, by a wide margin, despite having won an endorsement from former President Donald Trump.

Crank was among the congressional candidates who urged Williams to resign in a series of letters this summer.

Some Republicans have been calling on Williams to step aside since January, when he launched his congressional campaign and the state party abandoned its longstanding policy of remaining neutral in contested primaries.

The organized effort to fire Williams, however, caught fire in June when the state GOP attacked the LGBTQ community and Pride Month, including a directive to “Burn all the #Pride flags,” in emails and social media posts.

Through it all, Williams and his supporters have responded that his combative approach to politics is what Republicans wanted when the central committee elected him to chair the party in March 2023.

Colorado Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib told Colorado Politics that the state Republicans’ disorder resembled the party’s political prospects, which he characterized as “shoveling sand with a pitchfork.”

“Williams is merely a symptom of the disease plaguing the MAGA GOP: hatred for their neighbors, division as a core principle, and a sharp right turn towards supporting autocrats,” Murib said in a text message. 

This developing story has been updated.