Why Candidates Are Campaigning To The Wire Despite CO’s Mail-In Voting

Supporters of Colorado Republican Senate candidates Ken Buck and Jane Norton
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Today, for the first time in Colorado history, a mail-in voting system will be used for Congressional midterm primaries. Voters in most of the state’s counties received ballots weeks ago, and hundreds of thousands have already mailed them back.

Mailed ballots must be received by 7 p.m. tonight, otherwise they don’t count. But that doesn’t quite mean the voting’s all over. Those who have not yet done so can still vote up until 7 p.m. tonight at designated “drop-off” locations. And as candidates get in their final few hours of campaigning, the question is: with so many people having already mailed their ballots, have the contests already been decided? Turns out it’s hard to say for sure.

Kristen Thomson, a former lobbyist with the Vote By Mail project in Colorado, who helped write the mail-in voting law, told TPM that mail-in balloting has been used heavily in the state over the last ten years, for local, nonpartisan elections. And yet, despite the presumed convenience of mail-in voting, Thomson says “drop-off” voting has been popular in previous elections, too.

Thomson says there was a “big surge in ballots received at the end in 2008” and that “people did hold on to their ballots.” In fact, she confessed Monday that she had yet to turn hers in, with just about 24 hours to go till the deadline.

Still, reports indicate that huge numbers of voters have already returned their ballots. CBS4 in Denver reports that 600,000 of the 1.5 million ballots mailed out have already been sent back.

Both Democratic Senate primary candidates, Sen. Michael Bennet and Andrew Romanoff, sent emails out to supporters this weekend reminding them it was too late to safely put their ballots in the mail if they hadn’t already done so. At this point, if you want to vote in Colorado, you’ve gotta do it in person.

Latest DC
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: