Soviet Style County Ballots

While we have covered only one county level race (the Larimer County assessor’s race, which scandal ridden assessor Steve Miller won by about 6 percentage points), all of Colorado’s counties other than the City and County of Denver, and the City and County of Broomfield, 62 in all, have elected county commissioners, a clerk and recorder, a treasurer, an assessor, a sheriff, a surveyor, and a coroner.  Elections for those posts were also held on Tuesday.Well, they put names on the ballot anyway, sometimes.  No county had a contest for every possible county executive branch position, while 19 Colorado counties had no contested races in the general election for those posts, and another 23 counties had only one such contest. A large number of these races were uncontested, and a significant number of races in rural counties had no one running for the office.  The number of counties with contested races for each post appears below.

Counties (out of 62) with contested races for the post shown:

County Commissioner 43
Sheriff 25
Clerk and Recorder 17
Assessor 16
Treasurer 14
Coroner 7
Surveyor 1

Some counties had no one running at all for a post, creating a vacancy on election day, and some counties had two rather than one county commissioner posts eligible for election.  Surveyor was the office in which it was most common to have no one at all seeking the office, although an exact number of races with no one seeking office is difficult to pin down as the manner in which this is reported (by omitted discussion of the race, or expressly noting that there is no contest) varies.

The number of contested races for county office other than county commissioner, out of six possible, in Colorado counties, it set forth below.

Contested Races
0: 19
1: 23
2: 11
3: 1
4: 4
5: 3
6: 0

All the data above comes from the hard copy of today’s Denver Post.

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