November 03, 2016 11:45 AM UTC

Where's the Votes?

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• by: Colorado Pols

We’ve been updating you regularly on the rate of ballot returns in Colorado, and the news has been pretty consistent: Democrats have been returning ballots at a greater rate than Republicans from wire-to-wire. This is an early voting advantage that has always favored Republicans in Colorado, so the fact that Democrats are ahead at all in pre-Election Day voting is significant news.

According to the latest ballot return figures provided by the Secretary of State’s office, Republicans are starting to catch up, albeit slowly:

Democrats:     508,938
Republicans:  494,757
Unaffiliated:   383,275
TOTAL:          1,406,573

Without enough context, these numbers leave a lot of room for speculation. Where are the rest of the votes? In which counties should we expect to see the largest increases through Election Day? Where in the hell is Hinsdale County?

To help answer those questions, we made a chart:

What does this all mean? That depends on which prior election year you use for comparison’s sake, though any comparison would be difficult given that this is the first year in history that Colorado is an all-mail ballot state in a Presidential cycle.

Since this is a Presidential election year, and since mail ballots should theoretically increase turnout, it’s probably best to compare 2016 turnout with 2012; in that case, it looks like voters in the most populous counties in Colorado are only about halfway to their projected totals. This is likely good news for Democrats, because historically it is Democrats who have usually turned out in greater numbers the closer we get to Election Day.

So, if you’ve volunteered for get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts this weekend, your work will not be in vain. Also, this chart is worthless if you want to find Hinsdale County.