BOULDER, Colo.—Vote counting in Boulder County dragged on as bipartisan teams checked thousands of mail-in ballots for accuracy Wednesday.
The slow count made it tough to tell whether state voters passed Amendment 46, an affirmative action ban. The proposal was trailing by about 14,000 votes out of 2 million that were counted statewide, or about 91 percent of the projected vote total, with thousands of votes still to be counted in Boulder and Adams counties.
Boulder County election officials wanted to make sure dust wouldn’t affect how voting equipment tabulates the mail-in ballots. An election staffer discovered on Sunday that dust could potentially cause a “phantom” vote to appear for an issue that a voter had left blank on the ballot, Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall said. The cause was unclear.
The problem had not come up in previous elections or tests, Hall said. “We were very surprised to see it,” Hall said.
She did not have an exact count of “phantom” votes that were found but said it was enough to warrant a glance at each mail-in ballot for potential problems.
Election workers had processed about 69,362 ballots as of Wednesday afternoon, and they planned to keep working until midnight. Turnout was estimated at 170,000 voters. There was no immediate estimate on when counting would be complete.
“Even if it causes us a lot of headaches, accuracy is more important than just getting the results through,” Hall said.
In 2004, Boulder County took three days to tabulate votes. But in that election, officials had to count ballots by hand because printing problems caused problems for optical readers.
Vote totals also were slow in suburban Adams County, where about 122,000 votes had been tabulated by Wednesday afternoon. Clerk and Recorder Karen Long did not return a phone message seeking comment on delays there or how many votes were cast. The county reported having 209,457 registered voters.
