City Clerk Kathryn Young sent election workers home for the night last month without completing the count.
City Clerk Kathryn Young said Colorado Springs voters started off “gung-ho,” returning 10,300 ballots after the first weekend that they had been mailed out.
The next two days generated big numbers, too, including a high of 16,553 returned ballots May 3.
But since then, voters have gone from gung-ho to ho-hum.
While voter turnout has climbed to 43 percent with 65,042 ballots returned so far, the number of returned ballots has decreased in recent days.
“Mondays have never been slow for us. Today was very slow,” Young said Monday.
It’s not unusual for there to be a spike in returned ballots at the beginning of an all-mail election and then at the very end.
But for Young, the slower pace is a concern because of what happened in the April 5 election.
Last month, voters flooded her office with an estimated 27,000 ballots on Election Day, which delayed the final count until the next day after Young sent all her election workers home for the night.
Young is encouraging voters not to wait until the last minute to return their ballots as part of a bigger plan to get all the ballots in the race between Steve Bach and Richard Skorman completed on May 17.
Here’s a breakdown of returned ballots:
May 2: 10,300
May 3: 16,553
May 4: 15,478
May 5: 6,279
May 6: 4,930
May 9: 6,217
May 10: 5,285
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