Rep. Ken DeGraaf’s top 10 reasons for opting out

By Rep. Ken DeGraaf | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

Editor’s note: On September 27, the Colorado Republican Party’s State Central Committee will vote on whether to opt out of the state-run primary election system established under Proposition 108. Rocky Mountain Voice is featuring perspectives from two prominent Republicans on opposite sides of the issue.

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.” — John F. Kennedy

Closing the primary is the right thing to do, not the easy thing to do. 

Compulsory open primaries were judged unconstitutional about 20 years ago because compulsory self-harm was deemed unconstitutional.

Let’s break that down:

Compulsory open primary = compulsory self-harm.
∴ Open primary = self-harm.
Self-harm is stupid. Stop it.

Kent Thiry invested millions of dollars to destroy the party system with Propositions 107 & 108 and reduce it to statist functionaries. Statist functionaries keep it in place, allowed to hide behind a 75% central committee vote where every non-vote is pre-assigned a value of “no.” A Convention of states vote requires 67%.

In a hypothetical 100-member central committee, 80 show up and there is a quorum. If 92.5% of that 80-member quorum vote to limit the primary to registered Republicans, does it pass? “No,” because 92.5% of 80 is 74. This means everyone who did not show up had a pre-assigned vote of “no” for opting out. This means those who want to keep wasting Republican time and treasure control the vote. The special interests ensured that opting out is virtually impossible, and will be controlled by unaccountability. The non-vote, by law, is not neutral. It cannot be neutral. The special interests who spent $5,000,000 to rope us into a values-eroding open primary knew exactly what they were doing, and they did & do so with complicit politicians. Keeping the primary open is the needed foothold to end the “We the People”-focused Caucus & Assembly.

Here is why I’ll be voting to support closing the primary:

1) The gilded turd. Anyone with sense knows “the gold standard” stinks, but if you touch it, you’ll find it’s full of… not gold. The universal mail-in ballot system has no functional chain of custody using ballot dumpsters, and absolutely no chain of custody using the USPS. There is no ID check, there is no confirmation that carried ballots are within the allowed number or kinship limits. At best, before BIOS passwords were compromised by Jena, the machines were only self-certified to comply “substantially,” where “substantially” is a completely self-determinate metric.There are three types of people who believe “the gold standard” is secure—clueless, complicit, culpable. If it can be hacked, it will be hacked, and all computers can be hacked. We are voluntarily relying on a hacked system to choose our candidates. 

2) Fiscal Responsibility:  Now both ballots are sent to all UAs, and all members of both parties receive a ballot. I was informed by the EPC C&R that each ballot cost over $8 to process and mail, so I’ll assume $12 for a UA ballot package. If we have 1 million Rs, 2 million UAs, and 1 million Ds, that’s $40 million. Consider that only about 25% vote in a primary and less than 75% vote in a general election. That means the open primary mails out $30 million in ballots destined for the trash—or worse, since loose and unaccountable ballots are ripe for fraud and impossible to detect because they are authentic ballots. Is being addicted to wasteful spending a good fiscal look for a party that promotes fiscal responsibility? Further, the open primary forces affiliation on our party in a voluntarily accepted violation of our 1A Rights. 

3) Strategic voting. Sending both ballots to UAs knowingly allows the UA-Left to vote in the R primary while voting D in the general election. Why? Looking at 2022 sample ballots for El Paso County, there were 16 contested R races, and only 3 contested D races—over 500% more. Since Ds are all clones, the only way to affect the outcome in the primary is for UAs to vote R, and the UA Left can choose the candidate best aligned with the Left and more likely to lose—or at least to represent their values in the Gold Domed Cesspool.

4) President Trump just declared Colorado’s election system questionable enough to pull Space Command, because a compromised election system would put it at risk to compromised and corrupt state officials. Voluntarily using the system that President Trump and our DOJ have deemed corrupt is a curious position indicating our desire for convenience supersedes our desire for security and accuracy. It’s definitely not a good look. 

5) TinaPeters.US is not a distraction. She could have easily renounced her testimony to save her hide, yet she has stuck to the Truth, even though many around her, and many in this party, have betrayed her. Not allowing her to present her evidence of fraud is very different than there being none. 

6) Jena Griswold. The state is the ultimate approval authority for petition signatures, meaning the state becomes the ultimate determiner of which petition candidates achieve the ballot. SB23-101 attempted to eliminate the Assembly completely as a means of attaining the ballot. HB24-1067 was an effort to save Caucus & Assembly from further attack.

7) Kent Thiry. Mr. Thiry wants to destroy values-of-our-Republic voting. The open primary is his idea. Stop doing the bidding of those who want to destroy our party just because it’s easy. Do you think President Trump will invest the resources to secure our elections if we embrace the corruption because it’s the easy thing to do?

8) Big money. The cost to achieve the ballot by petition costs about $20/signature, which is about $40,000 for 2000 signatures to ensure 1000 valid signatures, which must be approved by the State, are for the purpose of bypassing the party’s Assembly. At assembly, delegates will hear only 10 minutes from each candidate for nomination, second and vision of purpose for running. Spending $40k to avoid a 10-minute speech is $240,000/hr to NOT talk to the constituents whose vote you hope to secure. A petition candidate will need to wage a media-intense campaign with a limited mailer in a House District running $10,000-$20,000 to reach voters at just $1 apiece. Psychology says that after taking your face to the trash 7 times, people will consider you a valid candidate—another $70-$140,000 in fealty. A 30-second radio spot that ran for 2-days costs about $500—that incessant blast of campaign promises that will fall out as fast as election-night confetti come with a wallop of fealty as well. A single mailer for a small race will run $10-$20,000 and require many of these fealty demanding trash generators. When did we start trusting the media?

9) Forced Affiliation: Before Propositions 107 & 108 any unaffiliated voter (UA) who wanted to vote in the R or D primary had only to temporarily affiliate with, or identify as, an R or D and request a ballot. That was deemed emotionally traumatizing, so we are now required to allow those who wish to not affiliate with our party to have a vote in choosing our candidates despite “unaffiliated” being a recognized party in its own capacity. The Supreme Court has recognized the freedom of association as an indispensable means of preserving other First Amendment freedoms, but for the sake of convenience we surrender this freedom. A value is only a value until we trade it for something you value more, and a “no” vote says we don’t value our 1A. 

10) Unity. The Caucus & Assembly process allows “We the People” who lack “the resources” to wage a media onslaught to gain the recognition to access the ballot. An Assembly-only candidate requires 30% of delegates to land on the ballot while a petition-candidate requires only 10% recognizing the effort or expense of the process. If we really want to unify and not spend 3 months of resources on fratricide, closing the primary is the answer. You will hear the big-money candidates decry Caucus & Assembly as a bunch of insiders, but consider there are about 3500 precincts in Colorado, from which we form the various districts. The precinct election of delegates is open to all registered Republicans, which means every one of Colorado’s million-ish Republicans have direct access to electing or becoming the foundational representation—the delegate—to represent their neighbors at Assembly. Caucus & Assembly is a series of speaking directly eyeball to eyeball. The petition process is about hiring mercenaries to wander the byways for upwards of $80/hr to ferret out enough signatures to satisfy the SOS. Do you want the engaged voters of the precincts deciding who gets on the ballot, or a high-fructose-corn-syrup media campaign promoting the latest poll-tested talking points?

“Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

I urge a “yes” vote in closing the primary election to ensure Republicans maintain their right to association and responsibilities to security and fiscal accountability.

See the opposing perspective on the opt-out debate here.

Rep. Ken DeGraaf represents House District 22 in northeast Colorado Springs and has served in the Colorado House since 2023. He’s a 27-year U.S. Air Force veteran and pilot, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and holds a master’s in structural dynamics from Columbia University.

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.