November 12, 2008 06:16 PM UTC

GarCo Dems Screwed By Undervotes

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• by: Colorado Pols

An important piece of the story, and not just in Garfield County–as the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent reports:

All politics are local.

But for hundreds of Garfield County voters, that aphorism didn’t carry much weight when they headed to the polls last week. They were more interested in this year’s historic presidential race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.

Precinct-by-precinct voting results show that while 99.3 percent of county voters marked their ballot for a presidential candidate, just about 94 percent of voters made a selection in each of the two county commissioner races this year.

At least 1,243 people seemed to ignore the District 2 commissioner race between Republican John Martin and Democrat Stephen Bershenyi – a race where Martin came out on top by 350 votes.

About 1,325 voters also didn’t mark their ballot in the battle between Republican Mike Samson and Democrat Steve Carter. Samson won that race by 658 votes…

It’s pretty clear now that the massive turnout seen on Election Day, motivated by the presidential election, didn’t reach down the ballot nearly as much as hoped. Owing to the incredibly lengthy ballot this year and a widespread feeling among new voters that there was only one vote that mattered, many thousands of Colorado ballots were indeed left unmarked below the top one or two marquee races. Anecdotal reports suggest that the Obama campaign’s GOTV operation just didn’t have the time–or the inclination–to spend a lot of time talking to voters about ballot initiatives or local races.

And as elated as they may be by the results at the top of the ticket, Garfield County Democrats sure wish they had…