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."

Between 7 p.m. and 1 a.m., the Denver Elections Division posted results for 18,924 newly counted ballots in the contest over Initiative 100, the most contentious item being voted on.

Colorado Primary

  • View a slide show of photos from Tuesday's primaries across the state.
  • Watch video from the Denver Elections Division.
Some of those ballots were probably cast before election day and likely dropped off Tuesday.

The six hours to count those ballots meant that election workers were able to sort, process and tabulate an average of only 3,154 ballots an hour.

If the office maintains that pace for the November presidential election and the expected 140,000 people show up at the polls on election Tuesday, the world would wait until sometime Thursday afternoon to learn who won Colorado's potentially decisive nine electoral votes.

City elections director Michael Scarpello said that won't happen because the number of voters won't have a major effect on the counting time.

"You guys love to get predictions, but really that's not my major concern," Scarpello said.

"It's more about accuracy than it is about speed for me. Speed is not the primary concern. If ballots are counted slow, people might be a little irritated, but if they're counted inaccurately, they'll be very irritated."

Councilman Rick Garcia said he had concerns that the new system the elections staff adopted left no way for political junkies to break down results precinct by precinct throughout the night, or even know how much of the vote had been counted.

"We have to look at that for the general election," Garcia said. "The outcome for those presidential candidates in the state of Colorado will come down to precinct-by-precinct voting, and we're going to need to know where people have voted and where they haven't voted yet."

Scarpello said he thought Tuesday's election night went smoothly. He said the real slowdown in the system came from getting all the votes transferred from 186 precincts throughout the city to the elections division headquarters for vote counting. Those votes cast on election day got transferred first to 11 satellite centers, and then eventually to the elections division, which also operated as a separate satellite location.

There, the ballots were prepared for elections workers who already were sending other mail-in ballots and early votes through optical scanners for tabulation.

Scarpello said the elections division didn't receive the last batch of votes until about 10 p.m. Tuesday.

Then, he said, there's the process of preparing the paper ballots to be scanned into optical scanning machines that tabulate the votes. Scarpello said the number of votes cast shouldn't make a tremendous difference in preparation time, and that it should take just about the same amount of time to run them through the machines regardless of the number of ballots that must be processed. A more significant concern is the length of the ballot, he said.

If the ballot is longer in November, then more significant delays will occur, he said.

"If it's a two pager, you've doubled your processing time," Scarpello said. "If it's a three pager, you've tripled that time."

He added that he's analyzing whether the eight optical scanners will be sufficient, but at this juncture he thinks there's no need for additional equipment.

He added: "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."
