By Mike O’Donnell | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
I’ve spent the last few months digging deeply into the Colorado voter roll from all sorts of different angles and although politicians of a certain party and their supporters are quick to parrot that Colorado exemplifies the “gold standard” of election integrity, that very definitely does NOT appear to be the case after a close examination of Colorado’s voter roll, the rightful starting point for any such assessment of the quality of election integrity in this or any other state.
A closing line from the Eagles’ 1976 hit song ‘Hotel California’ seems to be the most appropriate way to summarize the apparent philosophy behind the approach taken by Colorado’s legislature and the current Secretary of State when it comes to the voter roll: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
It is easy to be added to Colorado’s voter roll but difficult to be removed. This way of approaching the voter roll seems to have guided all the actions of Colorado’s Secretary of State during her term in office: QUANTITY is better than QUALITY.
The Colorado voter voll by the numbers
According to data on the Secretary of State’s website, on June 1, 2026, there were 4,072,990 “active status” voting age registrants on the Colorado voter roll (an increase of 77,069 so far this calendar year) and 473,999 “inactive status” registrants (a decrease of 27,694 year to date).
The difference between an active status and inactive status registrant on the Colorado voter roll is that everyone with an active status will automatically receive a ballot in the mail each election cycle (Colorado is an automatic vote-by-mail state) and everyone who has an inactive status, won’t.
Anyone on the voter roll with either status can still vote in person at a polling place at any election although only between three and four percent of Colorado registrants have chosen to do so in recent federal elections. Most Coloradans vote by either returning their ballot in the mail or by placing it in one of the conveniently located ballot drop-off boxes around the state.
In addition to adult registrants, the Secretary of State’s website indicates that on June 1, 2026 there were 111,742 registrants aged fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years of age on the pre-registered Colorado voter roll, all ‘on deck’ to automatically begin receiving ballots the minute they turn eighteen.
The total numbers provided by the Secretary of State include 16,382 what are known as ‘confidential registrants’. These are registrants aged 18 and older who have chosen to redact all of their information from publicly available copies of the Colorado voter roll, for security, safety or privacy reasons.
The number of confidential/redacted registrants can be determined by comparing the total number of active and inactive registrants on a public Colorado voter roll dated June 1, 2026 (4,530,607) with the official count of active and inactive registrants (4,546,989) on a Secretary of State’s report dated June 1, 2026.
Information used in this paper has been gleaned primarily by reviewing and analyzing the public version of the Colorado voter roll, copies of which can be secured from the Secretary of State’s office for $50. (Some larger counties allow you to download regularly updated versions of their county voter rolls for free.) Members of the public who wish to review Colorado’s voter roll, will never have access to any potential inconsistencies or anomalies associated with the 16,382 registrants redacted from the public version of the voter roll.
How do you register to vote in Colorado?
Colorado is one of twenty-four states that utilizes a system of automatic voter registration. This means that most people are automatically added to the Colorado voter roll when they interact with either the Department of Revenue or the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing.
Eighty-nine percent of the 169,642 new voter registrations processed by the state in 2025 (all this data is directly available on the Secretary of State’s website) came through interactions with the Department of Revenue’s Motor Vehicle (DMV) offices. People are added automatically and then asked by mail, after the fact, if they DIDN’T want to be registered.
Automatic voter registration means that when a fifteen year old applies for a learner’s permit at the DMV, she is automatically added to Colorado’s voter roll and then notified of this after the fact.
For the vast number of new registrants on Colorado’s voter roll each year, there is thus no excitement around, or personal investment in, the process of registering to vote. It is ‘just’ something that happens. It isn’t a significant or memorable event, as it may have once been for past generations of Colorado residents.
Nonetheless, not every Coloradan is automatically registered to vote. Some proactively register themselves via an online process that requires them to provide either a driver’s license number (although they are usually already registered if they have one of these) or the last four digits of a social security number. If an applicant doesn’t have either of these, they can provide any of the forms of ID listed at https://www.coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/vote/acceptableFormsOfID.html.
These include things like a copy of a utility bill dated within 60 days or a current student ID.
In 2025, some 14,506 Coloradans (8.6 percent) chose to proactively register online.
Coloradans can also register by mail (1,526 in 2025) by email / fax (131), in person at a county clerk’s office (1,014), by signing up at a voter registration drive (1,648) or via one of the other options available. (While riding on an RTD light rail train one day, an individual approached me to sign me up to vote).
Federal regulations require that military recruiting offices in a state must offer voter registration services but in 2025 not one single Coloradan chose to register to vote at a military recruiting office.
Residency requirements to register to vote in Colorado
To be eligible to register to vote in Colorado, an individual’s primary residence must be in Colorado and that individual must have lived there for at least 22 days. Residency is defined by Colorado’s Revised Statutes section 1-2-102 (a) (I) as:
“The residence of a person is the principal or primary home or place of abode of a person. A principal or primary home or place of abode is that home or place in which a person’s habitation is fixed and to which that person, whenever absent, has the present intention of returning after a departure or absence, regardless of the duration of the absence. Except as otherwise provided in this section, a residence is a permanent building or part of a building and may include a house, condominium, apartment, room in a house, or mobile home. No vacant lot or business address shall be considered a residence.”
This section is further expanded in part (d) by stating that: “A person shall not be considered to have gained a residence in this state, or in any county or municipality in this state, while retaining a home or domicile elsewhere.”
Thus people with second or third (or eighth) homes in Colorado are prohibited from registering to vote in the state. However, there doesn’t seem to be much effort put into enforcing this rule. To illustrate this comment, the Secretary of State permits Oprah Winfrey, who owns homes in at least eight states, including Colorado, to nonetheless remain as an active status registrant in this state. Her Colorado ballot is mailed to her 23,000 square foot mansion in Montecito, CA each election cycle.
Exceptions to the rule prohibiting registering using the address of a “vacant lot or business address” as a registrant’s primary residence are also allowed.
Specifically, if someone self-identifies as homeless (or for those who struggle with the English language, as “unhoused”) when they register by completing a Colorado voter registration form (https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/vote/VoterRegFormEnglish.pdf), they may use ANY address they “regularly return to” as their primary residence. This can include a shelter, a homeless services provider, a park, a campground, a vacant lot, an intersection, a business address, or indeed any other imagined location. (One Colorado registrant has a set of GPS coordinates as his primary residence address.)
Neither the instructions on the Colorado voter registration form nor the definitions sections of Title 1 of the Colorado Revised Statutes define what is meant by being homeless or unhoused, nor is any independent verification required to confirm that someone is in fact homeless.
This is an obvious vulnerability with the Colorado voter roll that bad actors can and do exploit to register and vote in Colorado.
When someone self-identifies as homeless on the Colorado voter registration form, they can use ANY address as their primary residence, even one that doesn’t exist (the Secretary of State neither validates nor standardizes addresses on the voter roll), coupled with a mailing address that could technically send a ballot anywhere in the world.
Party affiliations
Because most new registrants are added automatically without input from the individual being registered, they are initially added without any party affiliation. The individuals themselves are encouraged to choose a party affiliation after the fact, which most choose not to do. Likely because they had no involvement or ownership in the process of registration in the first place.
As at June 1, 2026, of the 4,072,990 active status registrants on the full Colorado voter roll 1,005,460 (24.7 percent) were registered Democrats, 910,443 (22.4 percent) were registered Republicans, and 2,058,133 (50.5 percent) were unaffiliated registrants. The balance (2.4 percent) were affiliated with one or other of eight different minority parties.
The Secretary of State’s monthly statistical reports update the number of Colorado registrants in each of the state’s 64 counties by age group and party affiliation. The following table summarizes this data for the state as a whole effective June 1, 2026.
| Registrants | Total Number | Percent reg’d Unaffiliated | Percent reg’d Democrat | Percent reg’d Republican | Percent reg’d Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aged 15, 16 & 17 | 111,742 | 87.3 percent | 4.2 percent | 6.5 percent | 2 percent |
| Aged 18 – 24 | 446,657 | 72.6 percent | 12.7 percent | 11.6 percent | 3.1 percent |
| Aged 25 – 34 | 746,064 | 58.0 percent | 23.6 percent | 14.7 percent | 3.6 percent |
| Aged 35 – 44 | 744,351 | 53.9 percent | 25.3 percent | 17.6 percent | 3.2 percent |
| Aged 45 – 54 | 599,196 | 49.6 percent | 25.4 percent | 22.6 percent | 2.5 percent |
| Aged 55 – 64 | 579,116 | 43.0 percent | 25.2 percent | 30.1 percent | 1.8 percent |
| Aged 65 – 74 | 551,458 | 38.3 percent | 28.7 percent | 30.8 percent | 1.2 percent |
| Aged 75 + | 406,148 | 33.8 percent | 31.5 percent | 34.0 percent | 0.7 percent |
| TOTAL aged 18 + | 4,072,990 | 50.5 percent | 24.7 percent | 22.4 percent | 2.4 percent |
As registrants grow older, they are less likely to remain unaffiliated and more likely to be aligned with one of the two major political parties.
Mike O’Donnell is a small business advocate, nonprofit executive and economic development leader based in Kirk, Colorado. He currently serves as Executive Director of Prairie Rose Development Corp., a mission-driven lender supporting underserved entrepreneurs across the state.
Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a six-part guest commentary series in which the author examines Colorado’s voter registration system and voter roll, drawing on his review of publicly available records and the other sources cited within each installment. Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.