The bill was proposed to Colorado’s Senate Committee on State, Veterans and Military Affairs by its chair, Sen. Mike Foote, D-Lafayette. And the committee passed it, voting along party lines after hours of testimony.

A bill that would pledge all of Colorado’s nine electoral votes in presidential elections to the candidate who wins the national popular vote passed a state Senate committee Wednesday, sending it to the Senate floor for a vote.

Scores of professors, activists, lobbyists, and citizens filled the committee’s room, the nearby hallway, and a spillover room to hear the debate. Among them: newly elected Secretary of State Jena Griswold.

The bill is a partisan issue, some say, a rebuke of Donald Trump’s election in 2016. And many warned of unintended consequences, deepening fractures in an already-divided country.

But the national popular vote is the only true way for each individual ballot cast to be counted equally across the country, proponents say.