EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. — The leader of the Colorado Republican Party is no longer in dispute.
An El Paso County district judge ruled Wednesday night that the Aug. 24 meeting to oust Dave Williams as Colorado GOP chair did not meet the party’s criteria for the number of votes needed to remove him as an officer.
That means the vote to remove Williams as chair did not meet the threshold needed to remove him.
The subsequent vote to replace him as chair with Eli Bremer is also invalid since the vote to remove Williams is negated.
This ended up in court following dueling meetings of different factions of the Colorado GOP: the Aug. 24 meeting with members of the party who wanted to remove Williams and the Aug. 31 meeting with members that support Williams as party chair.
The Aug. 24 meeting was called by El Paso County Republican Vice Chair Todd Watkins and Jefferson County Republican Chair Nancy Palozzi, who said they had collected enough signatures among Colorado Republican State Central Committee (CRC) members to call a vote to remove Williams.
Those signatures were simply 112 names in a document that Watkins declined to share with Next with Kyle Clark.
The party deemed those names insufficient proof, but Watkins still called a meeting.
Williams sued to get a judge to rule that the Aug. 24 meeting that supposedly removed him did not have the quorum needed to call the meeting and then did not have the votes required to remove him as an officer.
The CRC bylaws require a vote of three-fifths “of the entire membership of the CRC eligible to vote at a meeting called for that purpose.”
At that Aug. 24 meeting, the attendees determined that the threshold was three-fifths of those eligible to vote who appeared at the meeting, instead of three-fifths of the 414 CRC members in total.
El Paso County District Court Judge Eric Bentley determined it was the latter.
“Because less than 3/5 of the entire CRC membership voted to remove Defendants from office, the vote was ineffective,” Bentley wrote in his ruling.
There were 161.67 votes to remove Williams as chair, with 12 voting to keep him. Fractional votes are possible based on party rules, and if counties have co-leadership roles.
The group that wanted to remove Williams contends that 89% of those eligible to vote at the Aug. 24 meeting voted to remove Williams, thus meeting the three-fifths threshold.
Williams argued that it would require 248 votes to remove him.
In his ruling, the judge used sentence structure to determine the meaning of three-fifths.
“The sentence strings together three separate phrases, with no commas in between: ‘by a vote of three-fifths of the entire membership of the CRC,’ ‘eligible to vote,’ and at a meeting called for that purpose,’” Bentley wrote. “Simply put, in order to remove an officer, there must be a vote of 3/5 of the entire eligible CRC voting membership, and the vote must take place at a meeting called for that purpose.”
Read the full decision below:
All the votes at that Aug. 24 meeting are now null.
That means Williams remains party chair, Hope Scheppelman is still vice chair and Anna Ferguson is still secretary.
Williams announced the ruling in an email to the Colorado GOP email list.
“Please know that your true State Party Officers will seek all legal accountability, in and out of court, against [El Paso County Vice Chair Todd} Watkins, Bremer, and those who worked in the shadows to sow chaos and orchestrate an unlawful coup against the majority will,” Williams wrote.
A phone call to Williams has not been returned as of Thursday at 1 p.m.
A three-day trial scheduled for next month between Bremer's GOP and Williams' GOP appears unlikely to happen as a result of this ruling.
The next Colorado GOP chair election takes place in March.