Colorado Democrats continue voting surge over weekend, now lead voting tallies by 30K

DENVER – Registered Colorado Democrats continued their voting surge Friday and over the weekend, again outpacing their Republican and unaffiliated counterparts in ballot submissions, according to numbers released Monday.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office updates the number of ballots returned via mail and votes made in-person each day, and breaks down the votes by which party each person who submitted a ballot is registered for.

Every ballot is categorized by each voter’s registration and does not say how a person voted. Colorado law allowed county clerks to start counting ballots on Oct. 24.

The county clerk’s offices open the ballots, check their signatures to validate them, and scan the results. However, the results will not be tallied or released until after the polls close on Nov. 8.

More than one-quarter of active registered voters (26.8 percent) have already voted in Colorado, Monday’s numbers show. Colorado saw a 71 percent voter turnout in 2012.

The numbers also show that registered Democrats submitted 62,087 ballots Friday and over the weekend, compared to 58,525 ballots from Republicans and 46,315 from unaffiliated voters.

Registered Democrats continued to build on their lead in overall ballots submitted so far, and now sit nearly 31,000 votes ahead of the number of ballots sent in by Republicans.

When comparing the overall ballot submissions so far to the number of active registered voters in each party, Democrats continue to show a lead there as well.

The 331,153 Democrats represent 32.1 percent of their voting base in the state. The 300,275 Republicans who have voted so far represent 29.5 percent of active voters registered for the party, and the 223,540 unaffiliated ballots submitted so far are approximately 19.9 percent of the number of active independent voters in Colorado.