What’s on your 2026 Colorado ballot: The seven judges every voter sees

By RMV Editorial Board

Seven judges are on every Colorado ballot this fall, and not one of them has an opponent.

Voters get a single question on each. Retain the judge, or don’t. One is a Colorado Supreme Court justice and six sit on the Colorado Court of Appeals, and every voter in the state sees all seven regardless of county.

The State Commission on Judicial Performance reviewed all seven and recommended keeping every one.

RMV reviewed every retention cycle in the state’s evaluation records going back to 1990, and across 121 appellate candidacies in 36 years, no Colorado Supreme Court justice or Court of Appeals judge has ever drawn an unfavorable recommendation.

The material behind those recommendations is public. Most of it sits a click or two past the page voters actually see.

What is the same for all seven

Each of the seven recommendations had a 9-0 vote. Each was taken with one commissioner absent and one seat on the 11-member commission sitting vacant, so no appellate judge this year drew a vote from a full commission.

The commission evaluates each judge the same way. 

It conducts an interview, reviews the judge’s self-evaluation, watches oral argument, reads a selection of opinions, and surveys attorneys and other judges. 

The statutory standards are integrity, legal knowledge, communication skills, judicial temperament, administrative performance, and service to the legal profession and the public.

Every one of the seven was appointed by a Democratic governor. Three by John Hickenlooper, four by Jared Polis.

Retain the justice and he serves 10 more years. Retain an appeals judge and the term is eight years.

Everything below is what differs from one judge to the next.

Colorado Supreme Court

William W. Hood III

Hood will be running the court by next summer. On Aug. 21, Chief Justice Monica Márquez announced that her fellow justices had selected him as Colorado’s next chief justice. He takes over in August 2027, when her term ends. Until then he serves a year of onboarding under her.

A yes vote gives him 10 more years on the court. He is scheduled to serve three of them as chief justice. The court moved that job to a three-year rotating term in 2020, replacing indefinite ones.

Hickenlooper appointed Hood in 2013 to replace Chief Justice Michael Bender, who was leaving at the state’s mandatory retirement age of 72. He took the bench in January 2014. Before that he spent seven years on the Denver District Court and 10 years as a prosecutor in the 18th Judicial District.

Voters retained him in 2016 with just under 71% of the vote.

Seven attorneys and 24 judges answered his 2026 survey. The commission’s narrative notes his work ethic, timely decisions and well-organized opinions, and raises no concerns.

The survey report behind that narrative carries results the narrative leaves out. One of the seven attorneys who answered said Hood does not meet performance standards. Attorneys scored him 3.0 out of 4 on general performance and 2.7 on writing, the lowest of the 28 category scores recorded across the seven judges. The 24 judges who answered scored him 3.8 on both measures.

His overall score was 3.6 out of 4, down from the 3.9 he scored in the commission’s 2025 interim survey. His evaluation page mentions neither the negative response nor the attorney scores.

His best-known vote is Anderson v. Griswold, the December 2023 decision ordering Donald Trump off Colorado’s primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The court split 4-3. Then-Chief Justice Brian Boatright, Justice Carlos Samour and Justice Maria Berkenkotter each wrote separate dissents.

The opinion was issued per curiam, so no justice signed it and the majority is not named in the document. The three dissenters identified themselves, which leaves Hood, Richard Gabriel, Monica Márquez and Melissa Hart as the four who made up the majority.

The underlying facts are narrower than the shorthand.

Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace held a five-day trial and found by clear and convincing evidence that Trump engaged in insurrection as Section 3 uses the term. She then ruled Section 3 does not reach the presidency and denied the petition. The Colorado Supreme Court reversed that second part.

Trump was never criminally charged with insurrection. The federal Jan. 6 indictment carried four counts, and 18 U.S.C. Section 2383 was not among them.

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Colorado unanimously in March 2024, holding that states have no power to enforce Section 3 against candidates for federal office. It did not review Wallace’s factual finding.

In May, Hood wrote the majority in Boe v. Children’s Hospital Colorado, a 5-2 decision that reversed the trial court and sent the case back with instructions to order the hospital to resume puberty blockers and hormone therapy while the case proceeds. The four patients who brought the case sued on behalf of a class of transgender patients under 18.

He reasoned that the hospital’s fear of losing federal funding was speculative. He also held that the patients had shown a reasonable probability of winning their claim that pausing those drugs for transgender minors while continuing them for other children violates the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. Boatright dissented, joined by Samour, arguing the suspension was driven by a funding threat rather than by the patients’ protected status.

His record on taxes does not line up as neatly, and the two opinions that show it came a month apart in 2018.

In April he wrote the majority in TABOR Foundation v. Regional Transportation District, which held that a bill realigning the sales taxes of RTD and the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District with the state’s did not require voter approval. The realignment was projected to raise the districts’ annual revenue by 0.6%.

Hood wrote that legislation causing “only an incidental and de minimis tax-revenue increase” does not amount to a new tax or a tax policy change under TABOR. The opinion records no dissent.

In May the court upheld Aspen’s 20-cent charge on paper grocery bags as a fee rather than a tax requiring voter approval. The city had already banned plastic bags outright. Hood dissented, writing that the charge was plainly a tax and warning the majority’s reasoning would let local governments relabel taxes as TABOR-exempt regulatory charges.

On religion he also broke from the majority. 

In 2014 the court threw out a challenge to the governor’s Day of Prayer proclamations on standing grounds, and Hood dissented. He would have reached the merits and upheld the proclamations, applying a coercion test rather than the Lemon endorsement test.

Hood appeared with three other justices at a Denver high school last October and fielded questions about values and disagreement on the court. He said the justices defer to lawmakers “as representatives of the people” on policy. Asked about ideology, he said he does not see any of the justices “really bringing ideology to our discussions about how to apply the law.”

Colorado Court of Appeals

Rebecca Rankin Freyre

Freyre was appointed by Hickenlooper on Sept. 18, 2015, filling the vacancy created when Richard Gabriel moved up to the Supreme Court. She had been a deputy state public defender since 1991, latterly in the appellate division handling felony appeals. She was deputy chief judge from January 2022 to January 2026. She currently chairs the PERA board.

She and Harris are the only two of the six who have faced voters as appeals judges before. Both were first retained in 2018.

Three attorneys and 24 judges answered her survey, and all of them said she meets performance standards. 

Her overall score of 3.9 out of 4 is the highest of the seven, and well above the 3.4 she scored in the commission’s 2025 interim survey. The narrative calls her an exemplary jurist.

In the published opinions RMV reviewed, Freyre has not written a dissent in her eleven years on the court.

She wrote the court’s 2020 decision in Korean New Life Methodist Church v. Korean Methodist Church of the Americas, a property and control fight between a Colorado Springs congregation and its parent denomination in South Korea. The question was new to Colorado’s appellate courts.

She held that whether a local congregation has submitted to a national denomination’s authority is decided by neutral principles of law, not by deferring to the denomination’s own governance rules. The division upheld a trial court finding that this congregation never submitted, so it kept its property.

The Colorado Supreme Court declined to take the case.

Elizabeth L. Harris

Harris was appointed by Hickenlooper in 2015 to replace the retiring James Casebolt. She clerked on the 10th Circuit, was a federal public defender from 1997 to 2003 and ran her own appellate firm before her appointment. She earned her undergraduate degree at Georgetown University and her law degree at New York University.

Hers is the only evaluation of the six that names a weakness. 

Attorneys told evaluators she takes too long to issue an opinion. Judges, answering separately, flagged her timeliness in issuing decisions.

Two of the 22 judges who responded said Harris does not meet performance standards. 

All five responding attorneys said she does. Her overall score was 3.6 out of 4. Attorneys rated her writing 3.9 and judges rated it 3.4.

The commission wrote that it was confident in its finding despite how few people responded.

Her evaluation page does not say so, but Harris stood for retention in 2018 and drew a favorable recommendation. This is her second time on the ballot.

Harris has the deepest record of the six. 

In 2017 she wrote Carousel Farms Metropolitan District v. Woodcrest Homes, blocking a metro district’s condemnation of a private parcel. She found the district had acted as a developer’s alter ego and had gotten around the state law barring condemnation for economic development.

The Colorado Supreme Court reversed her in 2019, holding that takings “that essentially benefit the public will survive constitutional scrutiny” even when there is “an incidental private benefit.”

She also wrote the 2023 opinion in the open records case brought by the Colorado Sun and 9NEWS, which sought counts of child abuse reports at residential child care facilities. Judge Neeti Pawar dissented.

The Supreme Court reversed that one in March, but in the news organizations’ favor. It ordered the records released outright instead of sending the case back for more findings, as Harris had.

Katharine E. Lum

Lum was appointed by Polis in September 2022, replacing the retiring Michael Berger. She clerked for Justice Gregory Hobbs and practiced domestic relations law. She earned her law degree at the University of California, Berkeley.

This is the first time Lum has faced voters. Six attorneys and 19 judges answered her survey, and all of them said she meets performance standards. 

Her overall score was 3.8 out of 4.

In March 2024 Lum wrote Simpson v. Harmer, upholding a district court order that required the City of Durango to release a draft annual financial report under the open records act. She rejected the city’s argument that a document need only be related to an elected official’s decision to count as exempt work product. She also wrote that the ruling turned on the limited record before the division and might have come out differently had the city developed it further.

A month later she wrote Woodall v. Godfrey, which the opinion itself calls the first time the court had taken up an excessive force claim under the damages provision that SB 20-217, the 2020 law titled the Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act, added to state law. She set the standard as the objective reasonableness test the U.S. Supreme Court uses in Fourth Amendment cases.

Pax Moultrie

Moultrie was appointed by Polis in November 2023 and took the bench Jan. 1, 2024, replacing the retiring David Furman. 

She is the only one of the six who had been a judge before. 

She sat on the Denver district bench hearing juvenile matters from 2020 and was a Jefferson County magistrate before that. She spent a decade as an assistant county attorney in Arapahoe and Jefferson counties.

This is her first time on the ballot as an appeals judge, but not her first retention election. She stood for retention as a Denver district judge in 2022 and drew a favorable recommendation. Her evaluation page says only that it is her first retention as a Court of Appeals judge.

Her 2026 survey drew 36 responses, the most of any judge in the group. Nine attorneys and 27 judges answered, and all of them said she meets performance standards. 

Her overall score was 3.8 out of 4.

Six months after taking the bench, Moultrie wrote Nash v. Mikesell. The decision held that Colorado’s civil immigration detainer statutes are not preempted by federal law, that a 287(g) agreement has to comply with state law, and that the parts of Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell’s agreement with ICE authorizing detainer-based arrests are invalid. The panel was unanimous.

The suit was brought by Teller County residents represented by the ACLU of Colorado.

In June she wrote a divided opinion reversing a felony menacing conviction, holding that a fist is not a bludgeon under the statute. Both other judges on the panel dissented in part, on different grounds.

Karl L. Schock

Schock was appointed by Polis in September 2022, in the same announcement as Lum, replacing the retiring David Richman. He clerked on the 10th Circuit, practiced at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck and then served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the appellate division.

Seven attorneys and 21 judges answered his survey. Everyone who answered the question on performance standards said he meets them. 

His overall score was 3.6 out of 4. Attorneys rated him 3.3 on general performance against 3.7 from judges.

Schock wrote the April 2024 decision in Coomer v. Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., which let Eric Coomer’s defamation claims over 2020 election statements proceed against the Trump campaign, Sidney Powell and others. Coomer was Dominion Voting Systems’ director of product security and strategy.

Applying Colorado’s anti-SLAPP law, Schock held Coomer had shown a reasonable likelihood of success.

The division threw out the civil conspiracy claim as to the defendants who appealed it. The panel was unanimous.

He wrote another anti-SLAPP decision in March of this year, in a defamation suit brought by Derrick Wilburn, a member of the Academy School District 20 board in El Paso County. Schock held that a speaker who “fully and accurately discloses the conduct on which the accusation is based” may characterize that conduct as a crime, and that the characterization is “a constitutionally protected opinion.” Wilburn’s suit was allowed to go forward on a narrower set of statements.

His first notable opinion came in December 2023, a year after he joined the court. 

In People v. Wells-Yates he took up a habitual criminal sentence that had already been to the Colorado Supreme Court once. He held that a 64-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, built on three prior drug convictions, raises an inference of gross disproportionality under the Eighth Amendment.

Grant Sullivan

Sullivan was appointed by Polis in November 2023, alongside Moultrie, and took the bench Jan. 1, 2024, replacing the retiring John Daniel Dailey. 

He spent 12 years in the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, latterly as an assistant solicitor general in the public officials unit. He clerked for Justice Nathan Coats and for Court of Appeals Judge John Webb.

Nineteen people answered Sullivan’s survey, the fewest of the six. 

His overall score was 3.7 out of 4. Of the four attorneys who responded, one said he does not meet performance standards. All 15 responding judges said he does.

The split runs through the scores. Attorneys rated him 3.0 on general performance and 3.1 on writing. Judges rated him 4.0 and 3.9 on those same two measures.

His evaluation page does not mention the negative response. It is in the survey report.

In May Sullivan wrote Brooks v. City and County of Denver, which held that a plaintiff suing over a jail suicide under SB 20-217 must show the jailer or a supervisor acted with deliberate indifference. He borrowed the standard from federal law and applied it to the state constitutional claim. The case was dismissed.

His work at the attorney general’s office included voting rights and election law. 

Where these numbers come from

The summary pages most voters will see at knowyourjudge.com carry the recommendation. For five of these six judges, their evaluation pages carry no response counts at all. Those are in a separate survey report linked from each judge’s page.

Those reports show how many people the commission asked and how many answered. The commission invited 441 attorneys to evaluate Harris. Five answered. It invited 436 for Sullivan and got four. For Freyre, 344 invitations produced three responses.

The commission acknowledged the small-sample problem on exactly one page this year, Harris’s. It applies to all of them.

What a favorable recommendation is worth

Through the 2024 election, 1,914 Colorado judges had stood for retention since 1990. Commissions issued 27 unfavorable recommendations across all of them, or about 1.4%.

The state does not break those 27 down by court. RMV counted 121 appellate candidacies in the state’s evaluation archive, covering every cycle from 1990 through this year, and found no unfavorable recommendation among them and no case where a commission declined to take a position.

A finding that a judge does not meet performance standards requires a majority of the commission, so a deadlock produces a favorable recommendation instead. That is what happened this year to Judge JenniLynn Lawrence in Mesa County, whose commission split 4-4. Her entry on the state’s list shows a favorable recommendation.

One widely repeated figure does not match the state’s own count.

The Colorado Judicial Institute says five judges have failed retention since 1990. The state’s own 2024 statistical report puts the number at 16. Five is how many were voted out despite a favorable recommendation. The other 11 had already been flagged.

Commissions used the words “do not retain” through 2016 and switched to “does not meet performance standards” in 2018. The older label accounts for 22 of the 27 unfavorable recommendations.

Voters do not reliably follow the flag either. Of those 22 judges, 14 were retained anyway.

The judges your county sees

Below the appellate names, ballots differ. District and county judges appear only for voters in that district.

Most drew favorable recommendations. Two did not, and a third drew one of each.

Crowley County Judge Jeremy P. Boyce was found not to meet performance standards on an 8-0 vote, with one commissioner abstaining and one seat vacant. 

District Judge William David Alexander of the 10th Judicial District in Pueblo County was found not to meet them on a 7-3 vote.

The third is Judge Dina M. Christiansen of the 13th Judicial District. Her local commission found 5-2 that she does not meet performance standards, with two of its seats vacant and one member recused.

The state commission then took what it called the extraordinary step of issuing its own narrative, voting 8-0 that she does meet the standards and recommending she take part in a Judicial Improvement Plan. It also wrote that it cannot change or reverse the local recommendation.

Both findings stand. Her listing carries an asterisk directing voters to the full narrative.

Voters can see their own county’s list at knowyourjudge.com.

The evaluations, the narratives and the survey reports behind them are all public. Every one of them sits a click past the recommendation most voters will actually read.