Montezuma County recently reported a vote count, its first since about midnight Tuesday.
After the two-day pause, the Clerk’s Office added 2,155 votes to its count just before 5 p.m. Thursday, raising total turnout in the county more than 10 percentage points, to 76.65%.
There’s about 500 possible signature cures still to account for, Montezuma County Clerk Kim Percell said.
The race for Colorado House District 59 hangs in the balance. Republican Clark Craig trails Katie Stewart in the districtwide vote by 1,295 votes, 48.8% to her 51.2%.
District 59 includes Archeleta, La Plata, Montezuma and San Juan counties.
The Montezuma County Clerk’s Office declined to say how many votes it still needs to count, until 5:14 p.m. on Nov. 7, when Percell said results would be posted shortly.
On Tuesday, thousands of people in the county voted, and were still voting into the evening. The influx of voters that day made it so the eight judges were unable to finish counting ballots that night.
Still, Montezuma County posted three rounds of results on Nov. 5, stopping after the midnight count., at 12:14 a.m., according to the Colorado Secretary of State website.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Montezuma County Clerk and Recorder’s Office was forced to evacuate for about 30 minutes when an HVAC system on the roof overheated and filled the office with smoke, according to an alert put out by the Cortez Police Department.
Ballots technically don’t have to be tabulated until Nov. 15, said Hazel Wedemeyer, an election administrator in Archuleta County.
And results won’t be official and certified in Colorado until Nov. 27, she said.
Archuleta County, like Montezuma, hasn’t counted all its ballots yet. Wedemeyer estimated they have another 180 to go, as of Nov. 7 at 4 p.m.
A reason for this delay is that in Colorado, there’s something called a cure period that lasts eight days. That’s to give people time to verify signatures, provide a valid form of identification if they were unable to on Election Day, and let votes from citizens overseas arrive.
The cure period generally is not impactful unless a race is extremely close, according to an official at the La Plata County Clerk’s Office.
They said that La Plata had counted all the votes they had in its office as of Election Day, and to receive 100 more ballots during the curation period would be a lot.
There is a close race, though.
