After a brief respite (and perhaps a little sleep), the clerks for Colorado's 64 counties were back at work Wednesday, finishing up the tabulations for all of the voting that took place across the state.
"There's still quite a few ballots left to count," Matt Crane. president of the County Clerk's Association, told Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner. "Everybody votes a paper ballot. We saw tremendous turnout this year in the last two days, especially on election day, which is I think unprecedented numbers is what the final results will show in terms of voter turnout. So there's a lot of paper to go through and we're verifying eligibility on every mail ballot that was cast we're going through.
"It takes time to open 'em, to flat them and then tabulate them. So it's very time consuming."
When election officials are indeed finished with their work, and able "to come up for air," Crane said, there will be no small amount of irony in how the process worked this year, as opposed to 2020, when there were cries of "rigged" elections that continued up until the 2024 election.
"It's the same systems, and a lot of the same people who were in place in 2020 are in place in 2024," Crane, a Republican, said. "And just like in 2020, the systems worked properly. There was no fraud or stolen election, and I'm pretty sure President Trump won't claim that this year.
"It's funny how that works."
Similarly, Crane expressed disappointment in news that bomb threats had been made on Election Day at polling places in swing states like Georgia and other locations across the country.
"Our foreign adversaries are at play," Crane said. "They don't have to hack into systems anymore. They can manipulate people on social media. It's far easier to manipulate people than systems, and so when we have people around pushing this election denialism, the stolen election garbage, all they are are useful idiots for foreign adversaries who are trying to divide us."
