Colorado voters, here’s how your ballot is counted

With the 2024 presidential election just days away, our democratic election process is top-of-mind for many. Misinformation about vote counting and tabulation has been called into question in recent years, and confusion and skepticism are rampant.

Colorado voters may wonder: How does a ballot go from a piece of paper to a vote cast for the next president of the United States? How secure is our election process? And does my vote even matter?

On a recent tour of the Jefferson County Elections Office, a group of Metropolitan State University of Denver students learned how the Colorado elections process works.

“I wanted to see the ‘behind the scenes’ due to the fact that there can be manipulation,” said John Amolsch, an MSU Denver History major.

Hailey Glass, MSU Denver student-government member majoring in Political Science, also attended the tour. “It’s interesting to see how the process works live and in person,” she said.

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She thinks her experience will influence how she engages others on campus, especially regarding how secure the process is — “just having that reassurance that it’s a really secure process, and emphasizing that,” she said.

The tour took students through the depths of the Laramie Building (a.k.a. “Elections Headquarters”) to show how ballots are processed.

Ballot processing

From the moment they land in the ballot box, ballots are under tight security — surveillance cameras point at each of the 38 outdoor drop boxes in Jefferson County, which anticipates high voter turnout.

“We’re expecting 90% turnout for Jefferson County for this election, which is very high,” said Sarah McAfee, chief communications and community engagement officer for Jefferson County’s clerk and recorder.

Although mailing ballots and dropping them off are popular, anyone in Colorado can vote in person if they want to or need to.

“The Colorado system lets you vote any way that is convenient for you,” said Amanda Gonzalez, Jefferson County clerk and recorder (and former MSU Denver adjunct faculty member). “If that’s filling it out at your kitchen table, great. Mail it back, drop it in a drop box or bring it to a voting center and drop it there.”

Still, she adds, there are good reasons to vote in person. Voting centers offer accessible machines for voters who may need assistance. Colorado state law also requires in-person voting to be available in Spanish, something most mail-in ballots don’t offer. Also, if you lose your ballot, you can come to any voting center in your county and get a replacement.

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No matter how you submit your ballot, a bipartisan chain of custody is in place from the get-go. “A fundamental part of our process is that we do everything in bipartisan teams,” McAfee said. “No one is ever alone with a ballot by themselves.”

From the drop box, bipartisan teams collect the ballots, seal them in a secure ballot bag and transport them back to Elections Headquarters. Then, the ballots get processed through a sorting machine, which McAfee touts as the fastest, most high-tech sorting machine in the state, processing 50,000 ballot envelopes every hour. “Since we have such high voter turnout, we need a really fast machine,” she said.

Election judges ‘are regular folks’

Inside the sorting machine, a camera takes a picture of the signature on each ballot envelope, scanning the bar code and pulling up each voter file. By comparing 11 points on any one signature, the machine can match signatures with voter registrations to be sure the person is eligible to vote. If there’s any doubt, the machine sends the ballot to the manual signature-verification stage, manned by paid election judges or temporary election workers. “(Election judges) are regular folks who we train extensively,” McAfee said. “We hired about 900 of them for this election just in Jefferson County.”

People as young as 16 or 17 can work as election workers if they are preregistered to vote, but most election workers tend to be people who have flexibility in their schedules or are fully retired.

“One of the things I love about our election law is that it’s really convenient, and we have a longer vote period,” Gonzalez said. “But the other side is it means we need election workers for a little longer.”

All the election workers wear color-coded lanyards corresponding to their voter affiliation. For instance, red represents Republican, blue represents Democratic and purple represents unaffiliated. This ensures that teams are always bipartisan. What’s more, for manual ballot processing, all computer screens face inward to the center of the room. “Transparency is a huge part of our process,” McAfee said.

The next step is called casting. Election workers remove the ballots from the envelopes and check for anything that could prevent a ballot from successfully running through the counting machines: food particles, rips or tears or ink colors that aren’t machine-readable.

“They are maintaining that chain of custody, filling out accounting forms and preparing these ballots to go through our counting machines,” McAfee said.

Marilyn W., who requested that we use only her last initial, has been an election worker for 17 years and recently celebrated her 90th birthday. When asked how the bipartisan teams get along while working, she said they’re allowed to talk about their kids but not politics.

“When we set up the tables, we make sure that we have the different parties at the table,” she said. “Let’s say there were two reds and a purple working. If one of them leaves the table, we have to make sure that the parties are still the opposite.”

Every vote counts

The last step in the ballot process happens in the tabulation room, the most secure room in the building, where the counting machines are housed. These machines resemble big desktop printers and can process about 100 ballots at a time. The screens do not reveal results but simply confirm that a ballot has been processed. Each ballot then gets filed by batch and number, making them easy to retrieve during a risk-limiting audit — the final security checkpoint in which the Colorado secretary of state requests a random selection of ballots to ensure accuracy.

This happens not just in Jeffco but all over the state. “Every county has to match together for us all to pass,” McAfee said.

After the audit is complete, county clerks and party heads come together to certify the election.

Gonzalez, the clerk and recorder, reminded students that in Colorado you are eligible to vote if you are at least 18, are a U.S. citizen and have been in the state at least 22 days and see Colorado as your permanent home. What’s more, Colorado offers same-day voter registration. “We don’t have a voter-registration deadline,” Gonzalez said. “You haven’t missed it.”

In Colorado, you can register to vote and cast your vote on the same day. She urges voters to vote early if possible.

But does a single vote really matter? Gonzalez argues that it does, especially when you look down the ballot at all the local issues at stake. “You are voting on issues that actually impact your everyday life,” Gonzalez said, citing matters such as criminal justice and school funding. “It is stuff that, in particular, young people might even have more expertise on.”