By Mike O’Donnell | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Getting onto Colorado's voter rolls is only half the story. In Part 2, Mike O'Donnell examines how names come off the rolls—and why he argues the current process often leaves outdated registrations behind.
Centenarian Registrants in Colorado
The 2026 World Population Review estimates that there are 890 centenarians (people aged 100 or older) currently living in Colorado.
According to the public Colorado voter roll, the state is home to 1,569 centenarians.
Different local news sources identify that three 109 year old individuals potentially and currently share the title of the oldest Coloradan alive today. But according to the public Colorado voter roll, there are thirty-four registrants who are older, twenty of whom still have an active status on the voter roll and one of whom, a sprightly 110 y.o. man in Commerce City, managed to successfully vote in the November 2024 election.
The oldest Coloradan on the voter roll is remarkably aged 127.
Section 1-2-602 of the Revised Colorado Statutes directs how the Secretary of State deals with deceased electors.
“ (1) As soon as is practicable after the end of each month, the state registrar of vital statistics shall furnish the secretary of state with a report of all persons eighteen years of age or older who have died during the previous month. To the extent possible, persons on the report shall be identified by name, county of residence, date of birth, and social security number.
(2) The secretary of state shall forward to each county clerk and recorder monthly the information received from the state registrar of vital statistics concerning persons registered to vote in the county who have died.
(3) The county clerk and recorder shall cancel the registration of any elector who is deceased and of whose death the county clerk and recorder has received notice pursuant to subsection (2) of this section.
(3.5) The secretary of state may by electronic means cancel the registration of any elector who is deceased and of whose death the secretary has received notice pursuant to subsection (1) of this section.
(4) The county clerk and recorder shall cancel the registration of any elector who is deceased when the county clerk and recorder receives written notice of the fact. The written notice shall be signed by a family member of the deceased. If the county clerk and recorder has sufficient proof that an elector is deceased, cancellation may be made without such written notice.”
It seems likely that given the potential overabundance of centenarians on Colorado’s voter roll, either the State Registrar of Vital Statistics, the Secretary of State or individual county clerks may have fallen behind or missed processing, on a timely basis, cancellations related to some of the 3,711 deaths that occur on average in Colorado each month.
How is Someone Removed from the Colorado Voter Roll?
There are really only THREE ways that someone can be removed from the Colorado voter roll:
- They remove themselves;
- Someone at their former Colorado address marks and returns back in the mail a ballot sent to that former occupant as “no longer at this address” or “undeliverable”; or
- Someone dies and the State Registrar of Vital Statistics informs the Secretary of State and she informs the local county clerk or the local county clerk notices a local obituary. Statutes also allow a relative of the deceased registrant to inform the county clerk that a registrant has passed away.
The very best way to remove yourself from the voter roll is to complete and return a ‘Withdrawal of Colorado Voter Registration’ form downloadable at https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/vote/withdrawVoterRegEnglish.pdf
With all the stress and drama usually associated with moving, especially an out-of-state move, remembering to cancel a Colorado voter registration isn’t usually a priority for most registrants.
A default method is to have filed a PERMANENT change of address form (known as a National Change of Address form or NCOA) with the U.S. Postal Service. This is an official notification to everyone who corresponds with you, including the Secretary of State and the local county clerk, that you or your family have permanently moved to a different address.
Colorado Revised Statute 1-2-302.5 requires the Secretary of State to search the NCOA database MONTHLY and let county clerks know MONTHLY if any of the registrants on their respective voter rolls appear in the NCOA database.
If they do and notice that a registrant or their family has moved to a different state, the county clerk is required to immediately change the status of that/those registrant(s) from active to inactive and send a confirmation card to the new address.
NCOA data is sold by the U.S. Postal Service to third providers who resell it. (It costs someone like me $60 to run the entire public Colorado voter roll through the NCOA database so it isn’t expensive information to access.)
When the registrant(s) who filed the NCOA is/are contacted by the county clerk at their new address and they CONFIRM that they have in fact moved to that new address in a new state, the county clerk is directed to immediately cancel their Colorado registration(s) and remove them from the voter roll.
If they return the confirmation card saying NO, they haven’t really moved and it was all just a big mistake and we didn’t mean to file that NCOA after all, the county clerk will return those registrant(s) to an active status on the Colorado voter roll.
If the registrant can’t be bothered returning the confirmation card that the county clerk sends to them, or it gets lost in the mail on the way there or back (which almost never happens), the registrant will remain on the Colorado voter roll with an inactive status. If they then fail to vote in the next two or three federal elections they will be removed (or should be removed) from the voter roll after that second or third federal election.
The Colorado Secretary of State can easily and inexpensively (remember, $60 a month!) subscribe to a monthly third party report that cross-references every Colorado registrant with the NCOA database but instead she chooses to outsource this process to a partisan nonprofit membership organization known as the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). Colorado taxpayers pay approximately $50,000 a year to belong to ERIC.
Comparing the public Colorado voter roll with the NCOA database shows that NCOAs for active status registrants in Colorado are processed on a reasonably timely basis, albeit certainly not monthly, BUT NCOAs for certain months and in certain counties seem to have been completely missed.
The same issue can also affect preregistered voters, as one case illustrates.
It is possible that ERIC either “forgets” to send some monthly reports to the Colorado Secretary of State, or that the Colorado Secretary of State “forgets” to share some of those monthly reports with county clerks.
But however it happens, there are still currently 25,464 active status registrants on the public Colorado voter roll who’ve filed NCOAs and moved to different states, as far back as 2022, who remain on the voter roll. (Statute 1-2-302.5 allows county clerks to conduct their own NCOA searches if they wish to do so, and receive the information on a more timely basis.)
(P.S. The cost of mailing a first-class letter increases July 12 to 82 cents, just FYI.)
It is also a regularly observable phenomenon on the public Colorado voter roll that instead of a registrant being removed or a registrant’s status being changed to inactive when an NCOA was processed, occasionally that registrant’s status will remain as active and the new out-of-state address from the NCOA will be added to a registrant’s Colorado record as their new mailing address.
It is also worth highlighting that not every registrant who moves to a different state will file a PERMANENT change of address form / NCOA, and if they don’t, the ONLY way the Secretary of State will know if they have moved away from Colorado is if a ballot mailed to their old address is returned through the U.S. Postal System as “no longer at this address” or “undeliverable”.
The statutes specifically mention and require the return of undeliverable ballots through the U.S. Postal Service so if someone marks an unopened ballot as “no longer at this address” or “undeliverable” and drops it in a ballot drop-off box, it seems unlikely that it will be processed or treated in the same way as if it had been returned through the U.S. Postal Service.
If a registrant moves around frequently or simply wants to avoid the flood of ‘welcome to the new neighborhood’ junk mail that arrives at every new NCOA address, they may choose to file a TEMPORARY change of address form with the U.S. Postal Service. This only provides twelve months of mail forwarding (a NCOA is good for forty-eight months) but the U.S. Postal Service NEVER shares temporary change of address information with anyone.
Some Colorado registrants with no real ties to the state, likely many out-of-state or out-of-county students, wouldn’t even bother filing anything with the U.S. Postal Service.
The Colorado Secretary of State won’t take anyone else’s word that someone has moved away from the state other than if that word is passed back through the returned mail mechanism curated by the U.S. Postal Service.
If someone dies and the State Registrar of Vital Statistics misses it, a county clerk may accept a statement signed by a relative that the person has passed away but that seems to be the ONLY exception provided in statutes for a modification to a voter record other than by the registrant themselves.
So a landlord letting the Secretary of State know that a tenant in one of her properties has moved out, means nothing. Even worse, county clerks aren’t allowed to use information they could easily obtain from the county assessor that usually has an office down the hallway or at least somewhere nearby within walking distance.
This makes as much sense as mud because the county assessor maintains ALL the property ownership records for the county and knows whenever someone sells a home or condominium and moves away from the county.
Because county clerks aren’t allowed to act on information they might accidentally overhear from a county assessor at a county water cooler, the Colorado voter roll is sadly and unnecessarily littered with numerous instances where both current and past owners of a home, condominium or unit are listed as active status registrants on the public Colorado voter roll. (Ditto tenants.)
In many cases, when a current Colorado resident receives a ballot addressed to a previous resident, that current resident might choose to simply discard that ballot rather than do the right thing and mark it “not at this address” or “undeliverable” and put back in the mail.
If a NCOA was never filed or was never noticed, and a ballot is never returned through the U.S. Postal Service, a registrant could theoretically remain on the Colorado voter roll FOREVER as an active status registrant EVEN if they never, ever vote.
When the U.S. Postal Service returns ballots marked “not at this address” or “undeliverable,” they charge for this service and this information is publicly trackable. For the November 2024 election, 323,216 ballots were returned “not at this address” or “undeliverable,” costing Colorado taxpayers approximately $1.6 million.
For every mis-directed ballot that a responsible Colorado resident takes the time to mark as “not at this address” or “undeliverable” and put back in the mail, there is probably at least one other that ends up in the trash or a recycle bin.
This means that possibly well over 650,000 ballots were mis-directed for the November 2024 election.
If an elected Secretary of State’s only personal measure of success is how many active status registrants are on the voter roll (quantity rather than quality), there is no incentive to be proactive in trying to remove registrants who no longer live in the state. This seems to be how the current Secretary of State views her role.
I doubt that even once in the last almost eight years, she has ever even closely looked at the Colorado voter roll, let alone devoted any time or attention to how to better maintain the voter roll so that fewer ballots were printed and mailed to former residents, and fewer taxpayer dollars wasted, each election cycle.
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 2 of a five-part guest commentary series examining Colorado’s voter registration system and voter roll. Read Part 1 here. 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.