More than 2 million Coloradans have used online voter registration system

DENVER, April 2, 2018 -- Colorado has hit the 2-million mark for transactions made on the Secretary of State office's online voter registration system.

GoVoteColorado.com went live April 1, 2010, following the passage of a bill in the legislature in 2009. Colorado was the fourth state in the country with online voter registration, following Arizona, Washington and Oregon.

"The 2010 introduction of online voter registration revolutionized the way Coloradans registered to vote and updated their registrations – and more than 2 million transactions demonstrate its extraordinary impact," Secretary Williams said.

Of the 2,002,945 transactions between 2010 and today, 1,700,317 have been updates and 302,628 are new registrations. In other words, 82 percent of all transactions have been updates. A whopping 27 percent of all new transactions on the online voter registration system happened in one month – October 2016.

The two biggest months of transactions were October 2012 and October 2016 --- a month before a presidential election. Two years ago, 273,062 transactions were made in October. That included 82,978 new registrations, which was a record. To put that in context, there were 6.1 transactions for every minute in the month of October 2016 and 1.9 new registrations for every minute that month.

Colorado is the only state to allow voters to login to GoVoteColorado.com using the last four digits of their Social Security number instead of driver's license number.

The Secretary of State's office and the counties have calculated the cost savings of receiving an electronic form over paperwork that must be inputted by hand. The savings is about 95 cents per change of registration or new registration. That's a savings of $1.9 million over the life of the system.

"Online voter registration has added convenience and increased access to the ballot for Colorado’s citizens while also saving taxpayer resources that used to be spent on paper registration forms, " said Arapahoe County Clerk Matt Crane. "Arapahoe County has been able to reduce the number of full and part-time employees needed to process voter registration changes during a general election from more than 20 staff in 2012 to 11 employees in 2016."