Fifty-seven Democratic Party insiders voted Tuesday night. They selected the state senator who will represent 169,000 Coloradans in Senate District 25.
The district’s unaffiliated voters – 48 percent of the electorate – were not invited.
This is Colorado’s vacancy committee system. When legislators leave office early, a committee of party precinct captains selects the replacement. The public doesn’t vote. Unaffiliated voters – the state’s largest voting bloc – are excluded entirely unless they register with a party.
Twenty-seven state legislators serving next year got their seats this way. More than one in four members of the General Assembly owe their careers to a room of insiders.
William Lindstedt owes his career to two such rooms.
Faith Winter died November 26 after rear-ending a flatbed truck on Interstate 25. Her blood alcohol level was .185 – more than twice the legal limit. She was 45, serving her final term before hitting term limits, and engaged to former state Representative Matt Gray.
In April 2022, Broomfield police arrested Gray on suspicion of DUI at the elementary school his children attended. He withdrew from his reelection bid days later. A vacancy committee of roughly 40 party insiders picked Lindstedt to replace him on the primary ballot. Lindstedt won the general election that November.
Now Gray’s fiancée is dead from drunk driving, and the same mechanism elevated Lindstedt again. The 57-member vacancy committee voted 56-1 to ratify what Winter had already blessed – she endorsed Lindstedt for her seat before she died. The lone dissent went to Thomas Klenow, a CU information technology administrator.
The legislature tried to reform this system. It killed the reform that mattered.
Representative Bob Marshall introduced HCR 25-1002 with 14 bipartisan cosponsors. The resolution would have asked voters to bar vacancy appointees from running as incumbents in the next election. This would break the pipeline – no more leveraging an insider appointment into perpetual incumbency advantage.
The House State Affairs Committee postponed it indefinitely on April 7.
A weaker bill passed instead. HB 25-1315 requires vacancy appointees to face voters within a year. Governor Polis signed it May 12. It takes effect January 2026.
The reform is meaningless for Lindstedt. Winter’s term was already expiring. The seat was already on the 2026 ballot. He would have faced voters anyway.
Here is what the 2026 “election” looks like:
Lindstedt has raised $61,837. Klenow has raised $0. Mark Bromley, a former Republican running unaffiliated, has raised $0. No Republican has filed.
The vacancy committee handed Lindstedt a Senate seat and a functionally uncontested reelection. Fifty-seven people made that decision. The 169,000 residents of Senate District 25 will ratify it next November.
State Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib calls vacancy committees undemocratic. Representative Tim Hernández, who won his seat through a 39-vote vacancy committee, calls them undemocratic. Legislators benefit from the system while criticizing it.
The stronger reform died. The weaker reform passed. The pipeline remains intact.
Another vacancy committee will convene soon to fill Lindstedt’s empty House seat. More insiders. Another vote. The unaffiliated need not apply.
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