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RandySF

(70,613 posts)
Thu Oct 31, 2024, 05:27 AM Oct 31

At $14 million and counting, election reform measure is one of Colorado's most expensive ever

With only days remaining in the 2024 election, a sweeping election reform measure backed by some of Colorado’s wealthiest donors and corporations is quickly climbing the charts of the most expensive ballot initiative campaigns in state history.

Proposition 131, supported by the group Colorado Voters First, would abolish party primaries and enact a top-four ranked choice voting system for most state and federal elections. It’s one of six similar ballot measures being pushed across the country this year by Unite America, the Denver-based nonprofit co-chaired by former DaVita CEO Kent Thiry.

The campaign had spent over $14.2 million in support of Proposition 131 through Oct. 23, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the Colorado secretary of state’s office.

The spending puts Colorado Voters First in rarefied company, as one of only nine statewide issue campaigns in the last 30 years to exceed $10 million in expenditures in a single election cycle. It’s a level of spending typically only reached in ballot fights over proposals that would impact a single business or industry’s bottom line, like national retailer Total Wine’s failed 2022 attempt to deregulate liquor store licensing, or the tobacco industry’s successful opposition to a tax increase in 2016.



https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/10/31/election-reform-measure-colorado-most-expensive/

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At $14 million and counting, election reform measure is one of Colorado's most expensive ever (Original Post) RandySF Oct 31 OP
The billionaires really want this to pass Nittersing Oct 31 #1
Why? efhmc Oct 31 #2
Why what? Nittersing Oct 31 #3
Thanks for answering. efhmc Oct 31 #4
The principal funder of this "reform" measure is Kent Thiry, the rich former CEO of DaVita, generalbetrayus Nov 1 #5

Nittersing

(6,848 posts)
3. Why what?
Thu Oct 31, 2024, 09:02 AM
Oct 31

Why are drump's billionaires pushing this? I can only assume they've figured out a way to game the system.

Why is there no pushback? Maybe because democracy is being attacked from so many different directions, we can't keep up.

generalbetrayus

(646 posts)
5. The principal funder of this "reform" measure is Kent Thiry, the rich former CEO of DaVita,
Fri Nov 1, 2024, 10:52 PM
Nov 1

Colorado’s largest kidney care company from 1999 to 2019,

"In 2015, Thiry’s dialysis company, DaVita, paid $495 million in a whistleblower settlement where the company was accused of defrauding the federal Medicare program. The suit was filed in 2011 when Dr. Alon J. Vainer and Nurse Daniel D. Barbir noticed that DaVita was throwing out medicine that was still usable and billing Medicare and Medicaid for it."

"Until 2017, Thiry was a registered Republican, he gave financial contributions to the presidential campaigns of Republican candidates such as Mitt Romney and John McCain along with state and federal candidates from either party."

https://yellowscene.com/2024/03/29/kent-thiry-democracy-defender-or-real-life-monopoly-man/




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