Of the 293,153 unaffiliated voters who participated in the June 26 primaries, 6,914 submitted both Democratic and Republican ballots, ensuring neither was counted. Unaffiliated voters were told they could only send in one ballot.<\/p>\n
Still, state election officials and backers of the initiative to open the state\u2019s primaries consider the 2.4 percent ballot rejection rate a success for the inaugural run of the new law, The Denver Post reported.<\/p>\n
Based on a study of a similar open primary system in Washington, election officials had expected the first primary\u2019s rejection rate to reach as high as 7 percent.<\/p>\n
Secretary of State Wayne Williams said he was \u201cincredibly proud\u201d of the efforts by the media and county clerks across the state to get the word out that unaffiliated voters could only cast one ballot. In the weeks before the primary, he sounded the alarm publicly that plenty of early voters were filling out both ballots.<\/p>\n
The highest rejection rates for submitting both ballots were reported by southern Colorado\u2019s Conejos County, at 13.8 percent, and the Eastern Plains\u2019 Kit Carson County, at 10.9 percent.<\/p>\n
The lowest rejection rate \u2013 0.4 percent \u2013 was in Adams County.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
the 293,153 unaffiliated voters who participated in the June 26 primaries, 6,914 submitted both Democratic and Republican ballots, ensuring neither was counted. Unaffiliated voters were told they could only send in one ballot. Still, state election officials and backers of the initiative to open the state\u2019s primaries consider the 2.4 percent ballot rejection rate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[266],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-98853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-election"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98853"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=98853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}