The 2026 Colorado Ballot

You can register to vote in Colorado online, by mail, or in person, and you can register up to and including Election Day on November 3, 2026.

According to the Colorado Secretary of State, you can register online at GoVoteColorado.gov. You can also register by mailing a paper form to your county clerk, or by registering in person at a county clerk's office, a Voter Service and Polling Center, or a driver's license office.

Colorado conducts elections primarily by mail and automatically sends ballots to all active registered voters. The deadlines for the 2026 election depend on how you plan to vote: * To receive a ballot by mail, you must register or update your address by October 26, 2026, which is eight days before the election. * To vote in person, you can use Colorado's same-day voter registration. You can register and vote in person at a polling center up until 7:00 p.m. on Election Day, November 3, 2026.

First-time voters who register by mail may need to provide a copy of a valid identification, such as a Colorado driver's license, when returning their first ballot.

To make the 2026 Colorado ballot, a citizen initiative needs 124,238 valid signatures, and of the 14 statewide measures on this year's ballot, 13 are citizen initiatives and only one came from the legislature.

According to Ballotpedia, the baseline signature requirement is 5% of the total votes cast for the Colorado Secretary of State in the previous general election. Because that office is elected every four years, the current target of 124,238 signatures applies to all measures for the 2023 through 2026 election cycles.

If an initiative proposes changing the state constitution rather than state law, it faces an additional geographic hurdle. Organizers must collect signatures from at least 2% of registered voters in every one of Colorado's 35 state senate districts. Constitutional amendments also require a 55% supermajority vote to pass, rather than a simple majority.

News coverage from Colorado Newsline and the Colorado Sun confirms this year's ballot is heavily driven by citizens. Of the 14 statewide measures voters will decide in November 2026: * 13 are citizen initiatives that qualified by gathering signatures. * 1 is a legislatively referred measure (Proposition NN), meaning state lawmakers voted to place it on the ballot.

On the Colorado ballot, an amendment proposes a change to the state constitution, while a proposition proposes a change to state statutes.

In 2016, voters approved Amendment 71 to make the state constitution more difficult to alter. Under this law, any constitutional amendment that adds new language requires at least 55 percent of the vote to pass. If an amendment only repeals existing parts of the constitution, it requires a simple majority.

Propositions change regular state laws and always require a simple majority to pass. According to the 2022 State Ballot Information Booklet, the state legislature can change statutory measures in the future without voter approval, but any future changes to constitutional measures require another vote by the public.

The Colorado General Assembly uses a specific naming system to identify these measures: * Citizen-initiated amendments use numbers from 1 to 99. * Citizen-initiated propositions use numbers from 100 to 199. * Legislatively referred amendments use single letters. * Legislatively referred propositions use double letters.