The Colorado legislature right now is considering SB26-119, and it asks a simple question: Should every Coloradoan have a real shot at voting in the elections that govern their daily life?

I’m a student at CU Boulder studying Biomedical Engineering and Computational Linguistics. I grew up in Colorado, so on paper, voting here should be easy. Colorado has universal mail ballots. We have drop boxes. We consistently rank among the top states in the country for voter participation. And yet, my ballot goes to my hometown, which is an hour away. Forwarding it takes time I often don’t have. Missing a deadline is a real risk when you’re balancing labs, coursework and work shifts. I’ve made it work. A lot of my classmates haven’t, not because they don’t care, but because the system wasn’t designed with them in mind.

But here’s what most people don’t realize: The problem is far worse for elections that don’t make the front page. Colorado’s universal mail ballot system applies to state and county elections.

It does not automatically apply to the elections run by special districts and statutory towns, which are the local governments that set your water rates, fund your fire department, determine how your neighborhood is zoned and vote on whether to annex your property into a new tax jurisdiction. Colorado has more than 3,600 special districts. Their elections are often held in April or May, outside the county coordinated election system, sometimes still as polling-place elections with no automatic mail ballot delivery. A deployed service member who owns a home in one of these districts, whose property taxes will be directly affected by the outcome, may have no practical way to cast a ballot. Neither may a homebound elderly resident, a rural voter miles from the nearest drop box nor a person with a disability who cannot travel to a polling place.

My engineering background shapes how I see this. In biomedical engineering, we design systems around a foundational principle: Access to care should not depend on physical proximity when secure, reliable alternatives exist. The entire field, whether remote diagnostics, telehealth or mobile treatment units, is built on the idea that geography and circumstance should not determine whether someone receives what they need. The same logic applies here. We have the technology to securely deliver a ballot to a deployed soldier or a homebound voter and receive it back with full auditability. Why wouldn’t we offer this option?

SB26-119 is not experimental or untested. Denver piloted mobile voting technology in 2019, and every single participant in the follow-up survey said they preferred it to all other methods.

The security architecture, which includes end-to-end verification, encryption, multi-factor authentication, and the ability to publicly audit, already exists. The bill does not mandate anything. It is opt-in: Communities that want to extend this option to their voters can choose to do so. Communities that are not ready do not have to. It does not replace mail ballots, drop boxes or in-person voting. It simply adds one more path for voters who currently have none.

Colorado has built something genuinely worth being proud of. But a state that leads on voting access should not be comfortable maintaining a two-tiered system where the protections we guarantee in November disappear in May, and where the voters most likely to be excluded, whether they are serving our country abroad, living with a disability or a resident of a rural communities, are precisely the ones with the most at stake in local elections. SB26-119 is a small bill with a large principle behind it: that in Colorado, your zip code and your circumstances should not determine whether your voice is heard. I hope our legislators agree.

Melissa Wong is a student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studying Biomedical Engineering and Computational Linguistics.