Mayor Yemi Mobolade and other city leaders will fight to keep Colorado Springs elections in April in the face of a new lawsuit.

Mobolade, the mayor’s Chief of Staff Wayne Williams and City Councilmember Roland Rainey addressed the lawsuit in a news conference Thursday morning.

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday argued that holding municipal elections in April of odd-numbered years unintentionally limited turnout for Black and Hispanic voters, which violated the Colorado Voting Rights Act.

The three city officials called the lawsuit an attack on Colorado Springs’ home-rule authority and said it was beneficial for local voters to focus on local elections on a stand-alone ballot rather than competing with other issues in November.

“Colorado Springs municipal elections work because they are focused on Colorado Springs. When residents vote in April, they are focused on city issues, city leadership and city challenges,” Mobolade said.

Mobolade and Rainey said they also felt personally slighted as Black residents of Colorado Springs who were elected under the current system.

The lawsuit is the first challenge to a Colorado city’s election timeline under the Colorado Voting Rights Act, which was passed by state legislators in 2025. Mobolade had opposed the Colorado Voting Rights Act when it was in the legislature and said Thursday that he asked Gov. Jared Polis to veto it to avoid lawsuits like this one.

Aly Belknap is the executive director of Common Cause Colorado, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Belknap had campaigned for the Colorado Voting Rights Act in 2025 because of concerns that the federal Voting Rights Act was being weakened.

She said the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in a case involving majority-Black congressional districts in Louisiana was exactly the undercutting of federal protections that the state law was meant to protect in Colorado.

“It doesn’t make it OK for vast numbers of Black and Hispanic voters to be missing in the electorate simply because we have some diversity in the leadership of the city,” Belknap said.

The April election date has been set in the Colorado Springs city charter for more than 100 years.

City leaders said the lawsuit was coming from outside interests because the attorneys and one of the four parties are based in Denver.

“When you are actually going after the people of this community and telling them that their votes don’t matter because the people in Denver know better than you what you want, that is a reason to specifically speak out,” Williams said.

Two of the other plaintiffs are the League of Women Voters of the Pikes Peak region and Citizens Project, which previously sued the city under the federal Voting Rights Act about the April elections. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2024 after a judge ruled the groups did not have standing to sue.

The individual plaintiff in the lawsuit is a Colorado Springs resident and member of Common Choice Colorado. Belknap said the plaintiff regularly voted in the November elections but had not known that Colorado Springs’ local elections were at a different time.

Local election data shows a stark divide in general voter turnout between the April and November elections. There were 124,000 votes cast in the May 2023 mayoral runoff election between Mobolade and Williams. In comparison, the three city ballot questions that appeared during the November 2024 election each received more than 235,000 votes.

Williams is a former Secretary of State for Colorado, a position in which he oversaw the state’s elections. Williams said the lower turnout might be because local races do not have explicit political party affiliation, which tends to drive turnout.

Williams also poked holes in some of the lawsuit’s assertions. While the suit claims that Colorado Springs is one of only two major cities that hold municipal elections in the spring, Denver’s elections are held at the same time. Williams also said the lawsuit incorrectly describes how ballots are sent out to voters by Colorado Springs and El Paso County in different elections.

Rainey and Mobolade said the city should continue working to increase voter turnout for the April elections instead of changing the date.

“Protecting voter rights and protecting home rule, these are not competing values and we can and should work with both,” Rainey said.

When asked directly about placing the election timing question on the ballot for local voters to decide, Mobolade said his focus was on protecting the city’s home rule authority. Mobolade also said the issue did not seem to be a high priority for most residents.

A public vote on the issue would be fine with Belknap but she said it didn’t have to be on groups like Common Cause to get it there. The Colorado Springs City Council can refer questions directly to the ballot.

“The city still has a choice here. They could end this today by putting this on the ballot and letting the people of Colorado Springs decide,” Belknap said. “That is a perfectly acceptable outcome.”