If you filled out your ballot over the weekend and were planning to put it in the mailbox today, you don’t want to sleep on it. Oct. 26, eight days before Election Day, is the last day county clerks say you can mail your ballot and rest assured it will get to them in time.
While some states will accept ballots postmarked by Election Day, Colorado isn’t one of them. In Colorado, ballots have to be delivered to the clerk before polls close on Election Day.
“We are a ‘received by 7 p.m.’ state,” said Weld County Clerk Carly Koppes. “We do not acknowledge postmarks unless you are a military and overseas voter. Otherwise, if you don’t qualify in that category, we do have to have your ballot in our hot little hand by 7 p.m.” on Election Day.
This year, as we often do, CPR News heard from a voter realizing belatedly that they may not have fully thought through how to vote by mail.
“I put my ballot in a mailbox,” they wrote, “but I didn’t check to see if it needed a stamp. Did it need one?”
The short answer is — not really.
“If a person does not put enough postage and/or frankly just forgets to put postage on the counties, we will cover it,” said Koppes.
Colorado has a standing arrangement with the U.S. Postal Service to deliver all ballots to the county clerks, regardless of whether they have enough stamps, or any stamp at all. Clerks build some wiggle room into their budgets to cover that unpaid postage.
And despite all of the legal fights this year over the Postal Service’s role in delivering mail ballots, Koppes says everything is running smoothly on the ground.
“We now are in the time with USPS that they are doing their extraordinary measures” to get ballots delivered by the deadline. “So they are even (decreasing) their turnaround time for ballots.”
That extraordinary workload isn’t as big as it used to be though. These days, the vast majority of voters in Colorado, around 90%, use county drop boxes to return their ballots. No postage needed.
Whatever your voting method though, election officials would love to see you use it sooner, rather than later.
“Life happens and we don’t want something to come up and you don’t get your ballot to us. So instead of waiting until Election Day, the sooner you can get it into us, the better,” said Koppes.
Copyright 2026 CPR News