By Amy Spicer

On June 30, Colorado holds its primary election. Most voters will receive their ballots, make their choices, and never know that for many of the races on that ballot, the meaningful competition ended weeks or months earlier, in a room most of them never entered and may not have known existed.

Earlier this spring, I watched Colorado’s candidate qualification process up close. I personally attended and observed 10 caucuses and assemblies across the state, part of a broader statewide observation program that covered 24 unique events and more than 50 participant experiences and interviews. What I saw was not a system working as designed. It was a system straining under its own weight.

At the Democratic county assembly in Denver, a newly implemented voting app failed to distribute delegate data correctly, and voting stopped. Some delegates were told to move online, others left. When paper ballots resumed, the delegates who walked out were excluded from the rest of the assembly, losing their chance to advance. At the Republican statewide assembly in Pueblo, an internet outage delayed check-in for hours, leaving delegates standing in lines outside Massari Arena before the event could even begin. When balloting finally happened, the gubernatorial contest produced more votes than credentialed delegates. Delegates ultimately voted to accept the discrepancy and move on.

The chaos of this spring’s caucus and assembly season was not a fluke. It was the tangible outcome of a system that depends on aging infrastructure, inconsistent implementation and enormous volunteer effort, with no standardization and no safety net when things go wrong. The delegates and volunteers who show up deserve better. So do the voters who never got the chance to participate at all.

This is what my team at Courageous Colorado spent the past few months documenting in our new report, “Colorado’s Closed Road to the Ballot.” The research drew on direct observation of Colorado’s 2026 caucus and assembly season, historical analysis of 367 major-office primary races between 2014 and 2024, and campaign finance data from the current cycle. What we found is a system that functions very differently from the one most Coloradans think they have.

Colorado has, rightfully, become a national model for accessible voting. Ballots arrive by mail. Registration is automatic. More than 52% of Colorado voters are now registered without a party affiliation, a transformation that has happened faster here than almost anywhere else in the country.

But the process that determines who appears on that mailed ballot has not kept pace. Unaffiliated voters — the largest group in Colorado — cannot participate in caucuses, cannot attend assemblies, and cannot sign petitions for candidates seeking a party primary ballot. By the time most Coloradans engage with an election, a smaller and more ideologically concentrated group of participants has already shaped the field. Our research found only 22% of major-office primaries between 2014 and 2024 were contested by the time voters received their ballots. The narrowing happened earlier, in processes most voters never saw.

These consequences extend beyond any single race: When candidates must clear early thresholds in front of a narrow, highly engaged electorate, they’re incentivized to appeal to that group, not to the broader public they will eventually represent. Over time, that dynamic contributes to the polarization we can now measure in Colorado’s state legislature, which research identifies as among the most ideologically divided in the country.

The report we released last week outlines several concrete options for a fix, and these include streamlining and standardizing the existing caucus and assembly process, lowering petition thresholds to reduce the financial barrier to candidacy, or moving toward a fully open primary in which every voter participates equally from the start. There is no single right answer, and reasonable people will disagree about the path.

But the question Colorado needs to ask, before the June 30 primary and well beyond it, is whether the road to the ballot should reflect the state we have become or remain a relic of the system we inherited. Colorado transformed how people cast ballots. The challenge before us now is transforming who gets to shape them and opening the road to the ballot itself.

Amy Spicer, Ed.D. is chief impact officer at Courageous Colorado, a cross-partisan initiative working to transform the state’s political landscape by 2030, fostering citizen activation and advancing community-driven change to reduce partisan divides, increase representation, and build a forward-looking reform agenda that brings our state together.