Larimer County voters upended on election day plans to raise the sales tax to pay for transportation improvements.
Final and certified election results released Monday show that Ballot Issue 1A failed by about 7,700 votes out of more than 214,000 cast in the county.
Had the measure been approved, the 0.15% sales tax increase would have paid for a variety of bicycling, pedestrian, road, and transit projects, including bridge repairs. Ballot Issue 1A would have added about $17.2 million to county coffers each year.
Incumbent Democrat Jody Shadduck-McNally, who represents Estes Park on the Larimer County Board of County Commissioners, was re-elected with 54.8% of the vote against her Republican opponent, Ben Aste, while Republican county clerk and recorder Tina Harris easily defeated her opponent, Democrat Wyatt Schwendeman-Curtis, 57.7%-42.3%. Shadduck-McNally will serve a second term, while Harris will serve a first elected term after being appointed in April 2023.
Democratic district attorney Gordon McLaughlin will serve a second term after holding off unaffiliated former assistant DA Dawn Downs by 2,577 votes out of 198,859 ballots. That 50.6%-49.4% margin is noticeably closer than McLaughlin’s victory in 2020, when he defeated Republican Mitch Murray, 53.5%-46.5%. About 12,000 fewer voters participated in choosing the DA this year.
Harris told the Larimer County commissioners Tuesday that she had completed certification of the Nov. 5 election results. More than 230,000 voters out of about 273,000 registered voters cast their votes this year, representing an 84% voter turnout. That is a decrease from the 2020 election. Nearly all Larimer County voters – 92.5% – cast their ballots by mail.
Estes Park voters cast 6,322 ballots.
Estes Park’s new state representative, Lesley Smith, defeated her Republican opponent Steve Ferrante by 68.3%-36.2%, with 57,466 total votes cast.
Smith, a former Boulder Valley School District board member and University of Colorado at Boulder faculty member, is the University of Colorado’s regent-at-large and, in that role, represents the entire state on the institution’s governing board.
Local voters will next choose a state legislator in 2026, when Sen. Janice Marchman’s term expires and Smith would face re-election to the House.
County voters approved five of the seven proposed state constitutional amendments on the ballot this month, rejecting only Amendment K and Amendment 80.
Amendment K would have required citizens to submit proposed ballot initiatives one week earlier than is now required. It would also have forced judges to file for reelection a week earlier than they now must and mandated publication of ballot measures in local newspapers a month earlier than the current law compels.
Voters statewide rejected Amendment K, 55.15%-44.85%.
Amendment 80 would have established a right to school choice. It failed in the county, 52.7%-47.3%, and statewide, 50.68%-49.32%.
Colorado voters, including those in Larimer County, approved constitutional amendments that remove the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, overhaul judicial discipline procedures, allow judges to deny bail to first-degree murder defendants, and allow more access to a property tax exemption for disabled veterans. The state’s electorate, joined by county voters, also established a right to abortion access.
Statutory initiatives had mixed success with Larimer County voters. Propositions JJ and KK, which were uncontroversial, easily won approval, as did Propositions 128, 129, but Propositions 127, 130, and 131 did not find favor.
That largely mirrored results around the state. Voters approved statutes that will increase the amount of time defendants must serve in prison before becoming eligible for parole, create a new category of veterinary medicine professionals, provide more funds to law enforcement agencies, allow the state to keep all tax revenue collected from sports bettors, and collect an excise tax on firearm and ammunition sales.
The electorate said “no” to a ballot measure that would have banned trophy hunting and trapping of mountain lions, bobcats, and lynx and to another proposal that would have established a top-four open primary and ranked voting in the state.
Larimer County disagreed with the state as a whole on Proposition 130, the measure that will direct $350 million in annual funding increases to police.
Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold completed a statewide audit of this month’s general election results on Nov. 22. “Colorado’s bipartisan risk-limiting audit is complete and confirms the accuracy of the 2024 general election results and that voting equipment worked as it should,” the second-term official said.
Audits of every election in the state have been conducted since 2017. None have ever found any error caused by a malfunctioning device or other feature of the Centennial State’s election system.
Griswold ordered Monday a recount in Colorado Springs-based House District 16, where Republican Rebecca Keltie leads incumbent Democrat Stephanie Vigil by six votes, 20,641-20,635. That is a 0.0145 percent difference.