DENVER – A national campaign is backing ballot measures in six states to end partisan primaries, seeking to lower the temperature in a polarized country by eliminating a process that gives the most active members of both major parties a huge role in choosing the country’s leaders.

The $70 million effort to replace traditional primaries with either nonpartisan or ranked choice voting it is run by Unite America, a Denver-based organization dedicated to depolarizing the country.

“People are losing faith in democracy itself,” Kent Thiry, the group’s co-chairman and former chief executive of kidney dialysis company DaVita Inc, said during a debate in Denver about the Colorado ballot initiative.

Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, said the goal is to end a system where 85 percent of congressional seats are effectively filled in partisan primaries because districts are so overwhelmingly Democratic or Republican that whoever wins the relevant primary has virtually guaranteed victory in November.

Troiano said the Republican congressmen who voted to cancel the 2020 election after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol represent nearly all noncompetitive districts and had to answer only to their party’s constituents.

Supporters are excited about the scale of the campaign.

“It’s overshadowed by the presidential election, but this is the most important year for this kind of structural reform that I can remember,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University.

But some skeptics argue that changing the makeup of the primaries won’t make much of a difference in polarization, given how much of the country lives in either heavily Democratic or heavily Republican communities — and will naturally elect people who occupy those ideological extremes .

“It seems to add political complexity, weaken political parties, and it’s not clear what problem it solves,” said Lee Drutman of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC.

Ballot measures include proposals to shift to ranked-choice voting in reliably Democratic Colorado, evenly split Nevada and two safe Republican states where a sharp swing to the right among GOP primary voters has left traditional Republicans in conflict – Idaho and South Dakota.

Swing state Arizona and conservative Montana both have measures to switch from partisan to nonpartisan primaries. In Oregon, an initiative would allow parties to still hold their own primaries, but would require them to use electoral voting in certain state and federal races.

The ballot initiatives come as an unusual number of ballot measures are on state ballots in November.

Eight states will consider conservative-led measures banning non-citizens from votingwhich is already illegal under federal law. Connecticut voters will decide whether to allow anyone in their state to vote by mail, and Ohio whether to have a non-partisan commission draw their state’s legislative lines.

The biggest change in US elections could come from the increased adoption of ranked-choice voting. Each voter is required to rank the candidates in order of preference. If someone does not get a majority, the candidate with the lowest score is eliminated and that politician’s votes are reallocated to whoever their voters voted for in second place. This continues until a candidate wins more than 50% of the vote.

Ranked voting is a more complex way of conducting elections that is promoted as producing winners that better represent the entire electorate. The process is used in two states – Alaska and Maine – as well as in a few cities such as New York and San Francisco.

It allowed a Democrat, Rep. Mary Peltolato win the race to Alaska one congressional seat in 2022, even though the state’s GOP governor and senator also won re-election. This result angered many Republican activists, who then imposed bans on the trial in Republican-controlled states such as Florida and Tennessee. Now, even as other states consider adopting ranked-choice voting, Alaska voters will consider a ballot measure repeal it.

Critics say the campaign to attack partisan primaries is an effort to reduce the voices of ideologically engaged voters.

“This is trying to bring back centrism,” Jason Lupo, a conservative political strategist in Colorado who opposes the measure in that state, said during a recent debate in Denver. “This is one way to eliminate progressives; this is a way to eliminate conservatives.”

Critics also warn that the proposed changes come as conservatives have become more distrustful of the electoral processes ahead Trump’s lies about the fraud that cost him the 2020 race.

“It makes elections more complicated, and that, in turn, makes elections harder to trust,” Trent England, founder of the conservative group Save Our States, said during a recent debate on Idaho’s ballot measure. “Do we really think now is the time to do this?”

Still, supporters of the ballot measures say something needs to change.

Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican strategist from Arizona who worked for the senator. John McCainin 2022 he wanted to support a Democrat running for Congress in one primary and incumbent Republicans running for county supervisor in the other. But he was only allowed to vote in a primary in a state where the Republican Party he had suddenly swung to the right.

“I’m like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,'” Coughlin said after 2022, in which every candidate he worked for lost the Republican primary and the GOP candidates for governor, attorney general and secretary of state all lost to Democrats. November because they were too extreme for the state’s evenly divided electorate. “I can’t run an election on the sidelines.”

Coughlin was pleased to get help from Unite America, which donated $5 million to his Arizona initiative earlier this month.

The group was founded in 2013 to promote political independents. Troiano, who ran unsuccessfully as an independent for a Pennsylvania congressional seat, arrived to take over three years later. He helped her invest more in structural changes to democracy, such as nonpartisan redistricting.

Unite America has some wealthy backers, such as board members Kathryn Murdoch, the media mogul’s daughter-in-law Rupert Murdochand Kenneth Griffin, founder of hedge fund Citadel. His resources have become a target for opponents of his ballot measures, who argue that ranked-choice voting and other changes to partisan primaries will mainly help deep-pocketed candidates win elections.

Opponents of the measures focus on funding as a reason to oppose the change.

“These are not the kind of people I want writing my election law,” said Sean Hinga, a labor leader leading opposition to the Colorado ballot measure.

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Boone reported from Boise, Idaho. Associated Press writers Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska and Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon contributed to this report.