Matthew Ball, Denver’s policy director, won election to represent central and eastern Denver in the state Senate on Tuesday night, the third person elected to the legislature via a vacancy committee appointment in the past four days.
Ball beat six opponents over five rounds of voting to replace outgoing Sen. Chris Hansen, who announced shortly after his reelection in November that he was taking a job leading the La Plata Electric Association. In the final round late Tuesday, Ball won with 61 votes to state Rep. Steven Woodrow’s 37 votes in a vacancy committee of Democratic Party officials and volunteers.
Ball will assume office Wednesday morning, when the legislature begins its 2025 session. He will represent Senate District 31 for a partial, two-year term; he must stand for a general election in November 2026.
“This is the honor of a lifetime for me,” Ball said after the vote total was announced at a church on Colorado Boulevard. Before joining Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration, Ball was an attorney with a law degree from Stanford, and he’d served as a U.S. Army Ranger with multiple Middle East deployments. “This is my home, this is my community. I moved back to Denver to get civically involved because I wanted to do something that made a difference in the community I care about so much.”
The other candidates included Woodrow, who represents the Washington Park area in the House; Rep.-elect Sean Camacho, just elected to represent Denver in the state House; Chris Chiari, the owner of the Patterson Inn; Iris Halpern, a civil rights attorney; Shaneis Malouff, the chief of staff for the Auraria Higher Education Center; and Monica VanBuskirk, formerly the chief policy officer for Colorado’s health exchange.
Ball’s selection follows two other vacancy committee selections in recent days. The committees are made up of several dozen — though often far fewer — party officials and volunteers, and they’re called to replace legislators who leave office. The party of the departing legislator controls the process.
On Saturday, Douglas County Republicans picked former University of Colorado Regent John Carson to replace Sen. Kevin Van Winkle. Van Winkle, who was elected in 2022, stepped down after winning a seat on the Douglas County Commission.
On Monday night, Arapahoe County Democrats picked Rep. Iman Jodeh, a Democrat who represents Aurora in the House, to replace Sen. Janet Buckner. Buckner resigned shortly after her re-election in November, citing a need to prioritize her family and her health.
But it was the SD31 race that drew particular scrutiny. Hansen’s resignation became an open secret around Election Day, when he won his second term in the state Senate. His imminent departure from the chamber sparked a shadow race by some candidates to secure support to replace him.
Hansen also endorsed Camacho, as well as the candidate he wanted to replace Camacho in the House, and rumors swirled that Camacho’s victory had already been assured before Hansen’s resignation was public. Before the vote, Chiari said Woodrow sought his support the morning after Election Day, and Camacho called shortly after.
The jockeying brought on additional criticism and accusations of insider politicking in a process that’s already broadly derided as imperfect, if not entirely undemocratic. On Tuesday night, James Reyes, the chair of the Denver Democratic Party, acknowledged that vacancy committees aren’t “the most democratic way” to select a representative for roughly 165,000 voters. But he and Shad Murib, the chair of the state Democratic Party, both said they had sought to make the process as transparent as possible.
Jodeh’s win Monday night means that another more vacancy appointment will be held to replace her in the House in the coming weeks. More than a third of the legislature’s 100 members have won a vacancy committee appointment, in which a small number of party officials and volunteers, plus elected officials, meet to fill an open state legislative seat.
Buckner’s resignation — coupled with the criticism over Hansen’s resignation and subsequent replacement-jockeying — prompted Murib to call for reforms to the vacancy committee process. He previously told The Denver Post that he was planning to launch a working group to pursue those reforms.
Before the vote Tuesday, all seven SD31 candidates said they either didn’t support the current vacancy committee process or felt it needed reforms.
Denver Post staff writer Nick Coltrain contributed to this report.
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