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Coloradans have taken advantage of the state’s on-demand early voting and absentee ballot availability like never before. According to the Rocky Mountain News, nearly 700,000 votes were cast at early voting locations or through absentee ballots received by Friday, October 29, the close of early voting. This is out of a total of over 3.1 million total registered voters in Colorado.
No one can say what turnout will look like on Tuesday. Will early voters who waited two or three hours to vote turn out to have gotten off easy, as hordes of voters wait even longer to cast ballots on Tuesday? Or will it turn out that those who are the most highly motivated have pretty much all already voted, so that voting on Tuesday will be smooth and almost anticlimactic? If Colorado sees another avalanche of voters hit the polls on Tuesday, we might be waiting a long time for results Tuesday night, because anyone who is in line as of the official closing time of the polls at 7:00 p.m. is entitled to wait and cast a ballot, no matter how long it takes.