The presentation was delayed, but Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder Nancy Doty now plans to bring a recommendation to the Arapahoe County Commissioners on May 10 to set up voting centers for the November election.

The delay came because the Colorado Secretary of State’s office was going to ask the Legislature to pass a bill making this year’s voting centers unnecessary.

If the commissioners approve the proposal, the county election department will establish 17 voting centers at locations throughout the county instead setting up and staffing almost 200 polling places on election day.

The secretary of state’s office initially planned to ask the Legislature to change the state voting laws. That didn’t happen.

“The current state law requires counties to hold a vote-center election on odd years before they can have vote centers for even-year elections,” said Richard Coolidge, spokesman for the secretary of state’s office. “Our request was the Legislature rescind the off-year election requirement. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to get the legislation introduced and passed before the end of the legislative session.”

Doty said the original plan was to have a mail-in ballot election in 2011, Doty said.

“We had to change those plans because of the state law because, in order to save money by setting up voting centers in 2012, we must comply with Colorado election regulations and set up the voting centers this year too,” Doty said.

Setting up voting centers this year will cost about $80,000 more than having all votes cast by mail-in ballot in 2011. Doty said the county will absorb that cost because, in 2012, setting up 30 voting centers instead of staffing 200 polling places will save about $400,000.

Traditionally, there are equipment and workers at about 200 polling places for each November election. The proposal for the 2011 election was to replace those polling places with 17 voting center. That number would grow to 30 for the 2012 election. Doty said voting centers make sense since about 80 percent of the voters cast ballots by mail.

Doty said voting centers are more efficient and save money. She said the county hired and trained about 1,500 people for the 2010 election and deployed about 1,100 voting machines. She said, if the voting center is approved, the county will hire about 150 people for the 2011 election and deploy about 200 voting machines so it would be more economical to use voting centers instead of polling places.

Doty noted any registered voter can go to any center an vote as a result of the data on the real time information in the electronic poll books.