November 20, 2024 11:29 AM UTC

Never Let 'Em Tell You Every Vote Doesn't Count

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Public Radio’s Dan Boyce reported over the weekend, the closest Colorado House race anyone can remember, and we’ve been checking so let us know, is headed for a mandatory recount after the final tally showed a mere seven votes separating incumbent Democratic Rep. Stephanie Vigil of House District 16 from her Republican challenger Rebecca Keltie:

State law requires a recount for any race with a margin of victory of 0.5% of the highest vote-getter in that contest. That means half a percentage point of the winner’s vote total. In this case, that’s .5% of Keltie’s 20,640 votes — or 103 votes to be exact. Seven votes meet that already very narrow requirement.

El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker said he expected an order from the Secretary of State’s office early next week. Schleiker said a result that close after more than 40,000 votes are cast “does not happen often at all.”

“You actually see a district that is pretty divided, because we have two candidates that have two different ideas (for) moving forward within our community,” Schleiker said. His emphasis on the word ‘different’ is apt…

House District 16 represents a large swath of the northeastern part of Colorado Springs, and is as these results show was drawn to be very competitive. Rep. Vigil won the seat two years ago after a determined retail effort, knocking on thousands of doors and wearing out canvasser shoes–an effort her campaign reprised this year to reach this extremely close result. Ideologically, the two candidates are much farther apart, with Rep. Vigil having emerged as a champion on worker’s and LGBTQ+ rights in the legislature versus Keltie running unapologetically on an anti-abortion trans-boogeyperson agenda.

As Marianne Goodland reports for the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog, one other House race is headed for an automatic recount, although the Democratic candidate has already conceded after the final count showed Jillaire McMillan losing by a heartbreaking 128 votes to Republican Dan “Child of the Corn” Woog:

Weld County Clerk and Recorder Carly Koppes told Colorado Politics Friday there will be an automatic for House District 19, east Boulder, and south Weld counties. Koppes said the recount will likely start during the first week of December.

In that race, former Republican state Rep. Dan Woog of Erie holds a lead of 128 votes over Democrat Jillaire McMillan of Longmont. The 0.5% threshold is about 142 votes.

McMillan’s concession based on the unofficial final count makes sense, since recounts whether automatic or paid for by a candidate almost never change the result enough to flip a race separated by more than a hundred votes. Both of these races are unusually close, though the tension over either of these races being decisive, like former Rep. Debbie Benefield’s loss in 2010 by fewer than 200 votes that tipped the House majority to the GOP for two years, is absent.

A difference of seven votes, on the other hand, is in theory subject to change in a recount–and we’ll all have to wait until next month to find out who will represent HD-16. Such a narrow result is another reminder that while many races are not close, when they are, every single vote is priceless. If Vigil’s story doesn’t motivate candidates and field staff to knock that one additional door at the end of a long day of canvassing, we don’t know what will.