DENVER — Election Day is quickly approaching, but you still have time to make your voice heard.
Coloradans can mail in their ballot, drop it off at a designated location or vote in person on Election Day, which is Nov. 4.
The ballots, no matter how they arrive, are kept under tight security and surveillance before being counted by high-speed counting machines in the even more secure tabulation room.
President Donald Trump has called mail-in voting a "scam" and claimed without evidence that voting machines are "highly inaccurate." He has called for getting rid of both.
So, what's the truth? To get to that, Denver7 anchor Shannon Ogden spoke with Metropolitan State University Denver's Dr. Elizabeth Parmelee, associate vice president for undergraduate studies.
Is mail-in voting safe?
"Absolutely, yes," said Parmelee. "The way the ballots are handled all along the way is so carefully monitored, even from the point where they hit the mail from the clerk's office, coming to the voter."
Is hand-counting paper ballots more accurate than machine-counting?
"No," said Parmelee. "Hand-counting? We're human. You're sitting there counting, and people make mistakes. Not necessarily huge numbers of mistakes from hand-count,s but it is labor-intensive and it's very open to human error. The machines are far more accurate than the humans. When they compare and cross-check them, the errors are with the human counting."
Colorado has the added safeguard of BallotTrax, which allows you to receive notifications of the status of your ballot along its journey. You will receive a text message telling you your ballot has been mailed to you. After you mail it back or drop it off, you will then receive notifications that the ballot has been received, all the way through when it has been counted.
This week, Gov. Jared Polis signed an executive order activating unarmed members of the Colorado National Guard to help with election cybersecurity defense for the upcoming election. This has been done in every election since 2019.
