Boulder – Election officials were able to count votes on time Tuesday, just a year after it took a three-day slog before election results were known.
With a 10-day head start in this year’s polling by mail ballot, election coordinator Josh Liss was confident he would have results before he went home, even as a crush of voters turned out in an 11th-hour rush to drop off their ballots.
“It certainly isn’t going to take 72 hours” from Election Day, Liss said. “We’ve been able to keep up with each day’s ballots.”
Liss was preparing for a late night, but he was sure the votes would be counted. By 10 p.m. Tuesday, nearly 70,000 ballots had been tallied. “We’re going to stay here until we get them all counted,” Liss said.
Last year’s delay sparked a county-appointed review committee that blamed the delay on a “perfect storm” of problems.
Early last month, Liss and his staff discovered a new glitch in the county’s eight voting machines.
Creases caused by folds in the mail ballots got scanned as marks – similar to pen marks – into the computerized system.
The problem could cause inaccurate tallies, so the county had to devise a procedure for checking ballots before they were scanned.
After a slow start, Liss said Tuesday that the fold issue was not a problem, even as last-minute voters formed two-hour lines Tuesday night to drop off ballots that they didn’t have time to mail.
“C and D, that’s pretty much why I’m here,” said Cameron Blok-Andersen, 25, of the controversial proposed changes to the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
“I’m glad I stuck around.”
