There are no polling places in a mail ballot election other than an on-site polling place in the City Clerk's Office. Ballots must be mailed to the eligible electors no later than 15 days prior to the election. Ballots cannot be forwarded, so any elector who has moved and who did not change his or her address with the Larimer County Elections Office will not receive a ballot. The ballot will be returned to the City Clerk as undeliverable. There are several ways to return your ballot.
Every effort is made to ensure the secrecy of an individual's vote during the processing of ballots.
Ballots are processed in an assembly line manner, so that by the time the ballot is unfolded for counting, all identifying information has been removed. This assembly line processing enables 250 ballots to be processed in approximately 15 minutes. Ballots are scanned using electronic equipment rented from Larimer County. It is the same equipment that the County uses in its polling place elections. The machines that scan the ballots store the votes on a memory card, but do not display the results until the data is transferred to tabulation software after all of the ballots have been scanned through the machines.