Adams County/Broomfield District Attorney Don Quick is a step closer to being able to run for a third term.
Adams County Clerk and Recorder Karen Long said more than enough names have been verified on a petition that would place a question on this fall’s ballot. The question would ask whether the district attorney should be allowed to seek a third term. If voters say yes, the change would be effective in the 2012 election.
Long said her office’s decisions on names that were submitted can be challenged by any voter in the county through this Friday. No “protest,” as a challenge is called, had been received by Tuesday morning.
Any protest would go to a hearing before Long, and an appeal could go to district court.
Broomfield’s city/county council sent the question directly to the ballot on June 14, the day the petition was submitted there.
The Adams County petition was submitted the same day. “We finished it (July) 12th, I think it was, and put the wraps on it on the 13th,” Long said.
“It’s a big job and it took us nearly the entire time” that the law allows, Long said. “We used as many as seven people and it still took us that long.”
The “statement of sufficiency” was sent on July 13 from the clerk’s office to the petition proponents, Broomfield attorney Matthew Gray and Adams County Sheriff Doug Darr.
The petition that went to Long’s office contained some names from outside Adams County, and Quick wrote that his calculations indicate the total number of Adams County names submitted was 9,693. Of those, 7,335 were found to be valid, meaning the name of a registered voter matched the address. A total of 5,413 valid names are needed for the question to proceed to the ballot.
Quick credited more than 160 volunteers who canvassed for him. “Having 2,000 signatures in excess of what we needed is owed to the hard work of the people that went out and walked neighborhoods and walked parks, and I’m very humbled that they would give up their evenings and weekends to do that,” Quick said.
The most common reasons that some names were not verified was because the people weren’t registered voters, or because they listed addresses where they’re not registered, Long said.
The verification process included checking names that were common, said Long, who added: “It’s pretty tedious work to be sure you’re picking up the right voter by address.”
Signatures were not routinely verified, but a few were checked when there were several people with the same name, she said.
“It’s just a tedious process,” Long said. She said a statewide system that keeps voter records is “well designed.”
“The system does a lot of the work for us,” she said.
Scott Gilbert can be reached at scottg@metronorthnews.com