Republican Rep. Lauren Bobert has a lead of about 1,100 votes over Democrat Adam Fries. There is only 0.3 percent between the two. If the candidates are separated by 0.5 percent or less when all votes are counted, an automatic recount will take place. CBS Pueblo County Clerk Gilbert Ortiz says election officials have finished processing the ballots that came in on Election Day, but there are still hundreds of military and alien ballots left to turn in. , will be counted. Then there are provisional ballots, which are used by people whose eligibility is in question, and ballots where signatures don’t match voter records. These can be “cured” or fixed by next Thursday. Ortiz says he also kept about 100 ballots to mix in with the military and overseas ballots to ensure the votes are anonymous. Ortiz has been a Pueblo County employee for 16 years and is originally from Pueblo. He says the county is up for grabs, “The more I know about Pueblo, the less I know about how it’s going to vote.” He says he had observers from both parties watching the filing process and, he says, both campaigns also had lawyers present, “We invited them all to the process and so when I got numbers I would sit them all in a group and we would go through the numbers. That way both camps had perfect numbers and could report their elected officials or headquarters with accurate numbers. They always try to pressure me and I always tell them the same thing. politics for me. This is an election and I will make it as accurate and safe as possible for the judges and my staff.” Ortiz has just 6 full-time staff and 120 election judges. He says they’ve put in 12 hour days to record ballots. He expects fewer than a thousand military, overseas, temporary and healing ballots to come between now and next Thursday. It’s unclear how many ballots are pending in the district’s other 25 counties. The 3rd District stretches from Trinidad and Pueblo to Grand Junction and includes Eagle County. It favors Republicans by about 9 points and hasn’t elected a Democrat to Congress since 2008.
Shaun Boyd Shaun Boyd is the CBS News Colorado political analyst. Read her latest reports or check out her resume and send her an email.