Colorado Voter Registration--October Update

Over 200,000 newly registered voters in Colorado this year:

State officials say more than 217,000 people have registered to vote in Colorado this year, including nearly 113,000 since the end of July.

Monday was the deadline for registering to vote in the Nov. 4 election.

Richard Coolidge, a spokesman for Secretary of State Mike Coffman, says preliminary figures show Colorado now has about 3.1 million registered voters. About 1.1 million have requested mail-in ballots.

Coolidge says county clerks have canceled the registrations of more than 58,000 voters since January, about 2 percent of vote total.

Nearly 31,000 had moved to another county or state. Nearly 14,000 were duplicate registrations and nearly 8,000 had died.

More than 2,200 were canceled because they were felons.

One third of Colorado voters will be voting by mail-in ballot, most likely before the final get-out-the-vote push in the final weekend leading up to November 4. For all intents and purposes, the election has already begun (or will begin the moment the first mail-in ballots arrive, and will certainly be in full swing when early voting opens).

The most recent voter registration numbers (September 2) show that Republicans maintain a small registration lead over unaffiliated voters, and a still-sizeable 75,000 voter lead over registered Democrats--

D--955,428
R--1,029,062
U--1,022,575

According to the story there are around 3.1 million registered Coloradans on the rolls, which would add about 100,000 voters to the early September numbers. How they break will demonstrate the power of Democrat-oriented voter registration efforts, and how much Republican increases came through the draw of Sarah Palin as VP on the ticket.