County News

By Roger Baker
County Manager

2/3/2005 - I haven’t missed many Tuesday Board of County Commissioners meetings in the eighteen months I’ve been Gilpin County Manager, but there was an event scheduled Tuesday that was important enough that I (and the Commissioners) thought I should attend.

  It was a workshop held in Fort Collins, and hosted by Larimer County’s Clerk & Recorder Scott Doyle and his Chief Deputy for Elections, Jan Kuhnen. The subject was Vote Centers—a new and interesting way of conducting polling place elections (as opposed to mail ballot elections).

  Colorado election law is pretty strict in requiring that precincts stay fairly small, and the voting places remain within precincts. That’s an admirable sentiment, but in practice—at least here in Gilpin County—we’re starting to run into some problems because of it.

  For one thing, we’re having trouble locating public facilities in each of the precincts that we can use as polling places; they’re all supposed to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, too.

  Ballots are getting more complex, as well; and as we increase the number of precincts, it’s going to be harder and harder to get them to coincide with, for example, the school district boundaries. That means that more precincts will have multiple ballots, like we do now in precinct 1, where we also conduct the municipal elections for Central City for those folks who actually live in the city. And there’s a bill in the legislature (HB 1153) that would allow for election of County Commissioners by district, which would confuse things even more.

  But there was another piece of legislation last year (SB 153) that allows counties to establish “vote centers,” which function as a kind of master precinct. Anyone from any precinct can go to one of the vote centers in the county to cast a ballot, though the votes are still tallied by precinct. Needless to say, there are a lot of technical requirements in terms of information technology and telecommunications necessary to make this sort of thing work. But it sounds like something that Gilpin County might be interested in pursuing, which is why we wanted to learn as much about it as we can.