Don't Expect Final Results From Colorado Tonight

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

I have been unable to find a partisan breakdown of the early voters in Colorado in 2004, to see how it compares to this year's numbers — Democrats 33.44 percent (569,875), Republicans 32.64 percent (556,241), and Independents 24.71 percent (421,124).

I did find the party registration numbers for 2004:

· Republican 1,125,374
· Democrat 947,866
· Unaffiliated 1,028,886
· Libertarian 6,078
· Green 5,279
· Other 1,083
TOTAL 3,114,566

That breaks down to a modest 36.1 percent Republican, 30 percent Democrat advantage; this year the party registration numbers break down 33.1 percent Republican, 32.8 percent Democrat. I don't think anyone doubts that Obama will overperform Kerry's total and that McCain will fail to win the state by 5 percent as Bush did in 2004. The question is, in a much closer race, does McCain or Obama come out with more votes?

Apparently, we won't find out tonight:

"The days of having your close to final results by 10 p.m. are over," said Alton Dillard, spokesman for Denver Elections. "There are just too many moving targets in the election world these days. So we made it clear from day one it would take longer to be counted and we would be counting ballots well into Wednesday morning and that still holds true."

Dillard said paper and mail-in ballots take so long to count because the process to tabulate them properly is time consuming.

If a lot of states are close, this could make the election... complicated.

11/04 12:57 PM Share