El Paso County polling places ran out of ballots Tuesday, creating long lines for voters and delays in counting votes.
Some people waited up to four hours to vote, and others, frustrated by the wait, left without voting, according to some reports.
Sheriff’s deputies delivered extra ballots. Fewer than one-fourth of the county’s 385 precincts were affected.
Everyone in line by 7 p.m. was able to vote, said clerk and recorder Bob Balink, noting that turnout in the heavily Republican county was 10 percent to 15 percent higher than usual. But many were still waiting to cast their ballot more than two hours after the polls closed.
“Some people were terribly inconvenienced, and that bothers me,” Balink said. “But everyone who showed up and wanted to vote got to vote.”
Earlier Tuesday evening, Secretary of State Gigi Dennis, overseeing her first election in Colorado, said it was running smoothly. “We’ve had a few county clerks report minor glitches, but nothing too serious,” she said.
In some of the 35 counties conducting the election by mail, such as Jefferson County and Arapahoe County, some voters said they never got ballots, and others didn’t realize it was a mail election and went to the polls.
At Aurora’s city hall, droves of voters arrived with ballots. But Richard Wall, 41, was at wits’ end trying to figure out how to vote. “I showed up at the elementary school where I usually vote, and they told me they didn’t have any polls there,” he said. “I just got back from Cancun, where I was stuck by the hurricane. I didn’t get any ballot in my mailbox.”
Mineral County had a voting machine fail and couldn’t count about 400 votes. The clerks in Bent and Dolores counties went home without reporting results.
Staff writer Karen Crummy can be reached at 303-820-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com
