Aspen residents report issues with registering to vote on Election Day

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the accurate voting office for the Aspen municipal election.

Aspen natives Lou Lou and Gemma Goss didn’t get to vote.

“I think they should do a new vote,” Lou Lou said after encountering barriers to casting her ballot in Aspen’s Tuesday municipal election.

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The Gosses were among several voters who said they were unable to register on Election Day.

They attempted to register to vote at Aspen City Hall around 5:15 p.m., assuming she could do so under the special election day provisions. They were told, however, they needed to obtain a registration form from the nearby Pitkin County Motor Vehicles office. 

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When they arrived, the motor vehicles office was locked. They knocked repeatedly before a county employee opened the door slightly and informed them they needed to return to the county clerk’s office.

“I’ve seen at least a dozen people try and open the door that’s locked, and people are getting turned away to vote,” Gemma said in a video recorded on her phone.

Frustrated, they returned to the clerk’s office and explained that the motor vehicle office was closed. The response they received was, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“It’s frustrating when everyone’s being referred to in a circle,” Gemma said. “If they were going to close it, the least they could’ve done is left a stack of registration forms.”

Aspen City Clerk Nicole Henning said one of the key issues was the county clerk’s office closing at its normal time — 5 p.m. — instead of remaining open until 7 p.m., as has been the practice on election day to accommodate same-day voter registration. 

Henning said the expectation was that the office would stay open later, as it always had.

“The rules have always been that people can register the day of the election, and the county would stay open until 7 p.m. to help get people registered,” she said. “This year, they closed at 5 p.m. for some reason unbeknownst to me.”

She said she had requested that the office remain open until 7 p.m. for the upcoming runoff election. 

Pitkin County Clerk and Recorder Ingrid Grueter said no such request was made for her office to remain open until 7 p.m. on Tuesday.

“The city never sent us a request to stay open, and we have asked them several times if they needed anything, and they never mentioned it,” Grueter said. “I think they may have assumed that we were going to stay open late.”

Henning countered that she had never needed to make such a request in the past and speculated that recent turnover in the county clerk’s office may have led to the change. Grueter said her office is working with the county attorney to formalize an intergovernmental agreement with the city to clarify such procedures for future elections.

Voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was 2,718 — down 3.27%, or 92 votes, from 2023. The Aspen City Council race was particularly tight, with incumbent Council Member John Doyle and candidate Emily Kolbe falling just short of the 45%-plus-one threshold needed to win outright. Doyle missed the mark by 32 votes, Kolbe by 56. Christine Benedetti and Mayor Torre, who is term-limited, also fell short by 105 and 298 votes, respectively. All four candidates will move to a runoff election set for April 1.

The mayoral race was not as close, with 246 votes separating Mayor-elect Rachel Richards from challenger Katy Frisch.

The election has also reignited discussions about whether Aspen’s municipal elections should be moved to November. Voters initially approved a switch from May to November in 1989, only to reverse that decision in a special election in 1990, restoring the May election date. In 2018, Aspen voters changed the election to its current March time.