Josh Goodman is a former staff writer for GOVERNING..
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Colorado's Slow Count
There's a pretty good chance that the presidential election will come down to Colorado. So, the pace of the vote counting in Denver for Tuesday's primary suggests that we all should be stocking up on some gourmet coffee. From the Denver Post :
With a turnout of only about 10,000 voters for the primary election Tuesday, Denver political observers might have thought they'd get early results, including the outcome of a hot-button issue touching on immigration.
Instead, the count dragged on until 1 a.m., and anyone watching the Denver Elections Division website had no way of knowing how close election workers were to finishing at any given point.
"I kept waiting for those Internet numbers to come up," said Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz. "I must have hit the refresh button until I wore it out."
That's 1 a.m. Mountain Time, which translates to three in the morning on the East Coast. Michael Scarpello, Denver's elections director, makes a reasonable point in that same article:
"It's a balancing act. We could spend $8 to $10 million on new machines and have quicker results because we wouldn't have to tabulate at the end of the night. But is it worth it to spend $8 to $10 million to get something two to three hours faster? In our judgment it wasn't worth the expense."
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GOVERNING Politics is the place for news and analysis on campaigns and elections. If there's a ballot measure in California, a legislative election in Alabama, a mayoral election in Anchorage or a governor's race in Rhode Island, GOVERNING Politics probably is writing about it. We love everything about state and local politics, from polls and campaign ads to policy debates and demographic trends.
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