By Vince Phillips
In earlier parts of this series we examined Colorado’s election infrastructure, from ERIC’s shaky foundation to the mass exodus of states that no longer trusted it. Now let’s bring the focus home to Chaffee County, where the numbers on the ground raise some of the most concrete questions of all.As of April, 2026, Chaffee County has:
- Total registered voters: 19,368
- Active registered voters: 17,095
- Democrats: 3,949 (~23.1%)
- Republicans: 4,031 (~23.6%)
- Unaffiliated: 8,799 (~51.5%)
Chaffee County’s estimated total population is approximately 20,800–20,866. (Note: About 14.5% of residents are under 18 and ineligible to vote, so the citizen voting-age population is roughly 17,800–17,900.) This puts the registration rate at 112–115%+ of the estimated citizen voting-age population (CVAP). There are significantly more people on the voter rolls than there are actual eligible residents.
This overhang is not unique to Chaffee — many smaller and rural Colorado counties show similar patterns, but it persists here even with modest population growth.
Why Does the Overhang Exist?
Many of these excess registrations are supposed to be detected and cleaned by ERIC. Yet the problem continues. Here is how it happens:
- Inactive but not yet removed registrations (people who moved, died, or became ineligible but haven’t been fully purged).
- AVR and aggressive registration drives that add people quickly.
- Outdated or duplicate records that linger due to the “living document” nature of the rolls.
- Low-propensity voters who stay registered but rarely vote.
In short: the system is built to add names easily and remove them slowly and opaquely. ERIC’s 60-day upload cycles, unpublished timing, and limited transparency make it difficult to track changes in real time. Yesterday’s roll is already overwritten by today’s.
Signature Verification – Another Layer of Concern
Colorado relies heavily on signature matching for mail ballots. Counties use automated signature-verification software with adjustable thresholds. Signatures the machine auto-accepts are never seen by a human. Only questionable ones go to bipartisan election judges.If the threshold is set loosely (perhaps to keep rejection rates around the expected 1.0–1.4%), marginal or fake-but-plausible signatures can pass automatically. There is no public data on the false-acceptance rate of the software itself. These documented issues do not automatically prove widespread fraud. But they do prove the “gold standard” label is marketing, not engineering. Chaffee County voters deserve rolls that accurately reflect our actual community, nothing more, nothing less. The overhang is a symptom worth examining before every future election.
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