With less than six days left until polls close, Colorado clerks and election offices are encouraging voters — and there’s even an enticement of sorts for those who live in Denver and Boulder counties.
If they drop off their ballots by Monday, voters in those Democratic strongholds will help the rest of the state find out sooner whether Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump will win Colorado’s electoral votes in Tuesday’s election.
Earlier ballot returns also could speed up the results for , including a proposed minimum-wage increase, an aid-in-dying initiative and the creation of party primaries open to all voters.
Denver and Boulder are notorious as large counties where ballot counting stretches long past midnight, potentially delaying final results for close statewide races. That’s in large part due to a big share of voters who, by habit or tradition, make a point of turning in their ballots or voting in person on Election Day — about 30 percent in Denver, and higher in Boulder.
“Anything (returned) before Tuesday is going to speed up our election night operations,” said Amber McReynolds, Denver’s director of elections.
And that, in turn, will earn the thanks of nervous partisans elsewhere. Two years ago, the long wait for final results in Denver and Boulder had Gov. John Hickenlooper trailing Republican Bob Beauprez statewide until after midnight, when new releases from those two counties flipped the close race. Hickenlooper won by 3.3. percentage points.
And though the U.S. Senate race didn’t have as much results drama, Republican Cory Gardner’s initial lead over Democratic Sen. Mark Udall narrowed through the night, with lingering uncertainty. Gardner ended up winning by about 2 percentage points.
This time, both counties are urging voters through social media and targeted online advertising to return their ballots as soon as possible. Denver also has purchased ads on the Hulu TV-streaming service and on the music-streaming app Pandora.
The Denver Elections Division, like Boulder’s office, processes and scans mail ballots as they come in. Its goal during the day on Tuesday will be to scan all ballots received by Monday night, so that only the Election Day turnout ballots remain to be counted once polls close.
But Denver estimates another 90,000 to 100,000 ballots will come in Tuesday, whether in drop boxes or from in-person voting at vote centers.
Boulder estimates it will receive about 68,000 Election Day ballots, most of them after 5 p.m., said Mircalla Wozniak, spokeswoman for the Boulder Clerk and Recorder’s Office.
As it stands, Denver’s election officials are planning to continue working overnight and in Boulder, where the counting didn’t end until late morning in 2014, a repeat is seen as likely — unless voters help by voting earlier.
“We anticipate stopping counting procedures at 2 a.m., posting (a batch of) results at 3 a.m. and then starting back up again around 7 a.m.” after a break, Wozniak said.
