Tiffany Lee, the county clerk and top elections official in La Plata County, wasn’t sold at first on Colorado’s new law requiring every jail to create an in-person polling place for incarcerated voters.

Lee, who was elected as a Republican but is now unaffiliated, said she and the local sheriff didn’t appreciate a new mandate and felt it was too one-size-fits-all to work for a diverse state.

But Lee’s apprehension melted away on Oct. 22, when she and the sheriff opened their first in-person voting session at the jail, located in Durango. Lee recounted how a young incarcerated woman whom she helped cast her ballot profusely thanked her, and told Lee that the experience of voting made her feel like a part of her community.

“I had tears in my eyes,” Lee said. “I thought to myself: This is exactly where I need to be today. It was just an awesome feeling.”

Overall, 43 people would end up voting from the La Plata County jail in the November election, five times the number who voted there in the 2022 midterms, and double the turnout there in the 2020 presidential election.

Throughout the rest of Colorado, the increase was even greater: At least 2,332 people voted from jail in November, according to state data, a dramatic spike in turnout from just 231 incarcerated voters in 2022 and 380 in 2020. Many Colorado counties posted significant jail turnout in November after having zero, or nearly zero, jail voters in past cycles.

“We feel it was a great success,” said Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state. “It should send a clear message across the country that if eligible people are detained, there are ways to make it much easier for them to cast a ballot.”

No other state has ever conducted an election with polling places inside all its jails. Colorado’s novel approach, enacted last year via Senate Bill 72, emerged from longstanding frustration among voting rights advocates who consistently found that local sheriffs and county elections officials were uninterested in giving people detained in local jails ballot access, even though most of them are eligible to vote.

“We saw time and time again that if this wasn’t being mandated by the state, there was no buy-in from the local officials,” said Kyle Giddings, deputy director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.

People in Colorado jails are almost always detained pretrial — and, often, only because they can’t afford their freedom through bail — meaning that they are considered legally innocent and maintain their voting rights.

But even though they usually have the right to vote, few outside of Denver, which has held in-person jail voting since 2020, have gotten to do so in the past. In Colorado and beyond, local officials are rarely motivated to help people vote from jail, and can be outright hostile toward efforts to expand ballot access to incarcerated people.

Sheriffs, who control local jails, have enormous discretion over ballot access inside their facilities and can make it effectively impossible for incarcerated people to vote.

They do this primarily by restricting mail, which is how most incarcerated people must vote across the country, and by limiting the availability of voter guides and other information on local politics and elections. They also decide whether to allow third-party groups, like the League of Women Voters, to enter jails to assist people in registering and casting ballots.

State data clearly demonstrates how little attention sheriffs and election administrators gave incarcerated voters before state law required reform.

The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition estimates that at least around 60% of people detained in Colorado jails, or about 6,000 people during the 2022 and 2024 elections, are eligible to vote — which, taking into account jail population figures, would mean about 9% of eligible voters in jail cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election, compared to 71% turnout among the state’s overall registered voting population.

That also points to jail voter turnout of less than 4% in 2022, when Colorado elected its governor and many other major officers, compared to 59% overall.

Proponents of SB 72 hoped that state intervention would finally force local officials’ hands by removing their discretion over voter access. Giddings, who is formerly incarcerated, said he and his colleagues spent nearly a decade trying, and mostly failing, to promote jail voting access to county officials in the run-up to Colorado’s legislature passing SB 72 last spring.

“It’s really unfortunate that we had to pass a law,” he added, “because we gave opportunity after opportunity for folks to do the right thing. But sometimes you have to pass a law to get things done. And, obviously, these results show that we’re getting it done now.”

Before its approval, SB 72 faced substantial pushback at the statehouse. Most Republican lawmakers, plus some Democrats, voted against the reform, after some sheriffs and county clerks, mostly from conservative parts of the state, argued that it would pose safety hazards for election workers and cost too much to implement.

Above all, opponents said at the time, the reform was not necessary because jailed Coloradans already could vote if they wanted to.

That last argument was hard to square with the data.

In one memorable exchange during a committee hearing on the bill last year, officials from El Paso County, home to Colorado Springs and the largest jail in the state, which detains roughly 1,600 people any given day, told lawmakers they could “say with 100% confidence” that incarcerated citizens had the opportunity to vote — but then admitted moments later that zero people actually voted there during the 2022 midterms. The county clerk warned that implementing SB 72 would cost the county $2,000 per voter.

This past November, under the new requirements for in-person voting, 319 people voted from the jail in El Paso County. None of the county’s previously professed fears came to pass when officials held in-person voting at the jail for the first time this past November, according to Sgt. Kurt Smith, spokesperson for the Republican county sheriff.

“It actually went off a lot better than we thought it would,” he said. “There were no issues at all. Everyone who wanted to vote had the opportunity to do it. Nobody was upset about it, and there was a significant amount more people than we thought there would be.”

Similar stories played out around the state.

In the jail in Jefferson County, a liberal suburban area outside of Denver, 348 people voted in November, compared to just two voters in 2022. Weld County, a conservative area near the Wyoming border that reported just one jail voter in 2022, saw 183 incarcerated people vote last year.

Next door to Weld, in liberal Boulder County, jail turnout rose from zero in 2022 to 161 voters in November. In conservative, rural western Colorado, Mesa County reported 212 jail voters last year, up from 34 two years ago.

“Nothing about these numbers surprised me,” Giddings said. “People that are incarcerated are ready to have their voices heard. It’s a wonderful, beautiful thing, and I’m excited to see it expanding.”

Giddings believes Colorado can easily improve on November’s numbers. He points out that this past election was conducted just six months after the passage of SB 72, leaving local officials with little time to prepare.

The law’s requirements can be strengthened, he added. SB 72, though unprecedented, had a fairly narrow mandate: local jails must establish a polling place for just six hours on a single day, and only during November elections of even-numbered years.

Giddings said he hopes Colorado lawmakers will consider adding new requirements to promote jail voting during odd-numbered years and in municipal elections and primaries, and to make it easier for people jailed outside of their home counties to access their proper local ballots.

Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat who sponsored SB 72 last year, echoed Giddings in saying that the law was needed because history shows that officials won’t prioritize voter access in jails unless compelled to do so.

Gonzales, who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, said she’s interested in potential tweaks to further expand access for incarcerated voters; it’s unclear, she said, whether that could happen this session, which ends in May.

“We have a presidential election under our belts, so the next stress test will be for local elections and primaries,” she said. “But we shouldn’t have to wait to see whether voluntary compliance is sufficient.”

Some jurisdictions are, however, prepared to expand on the law whether or not lawmakers command it.

Lee, the clerk in La Plata County, said she’s already intent on opening a polling place in the local jail this coming November, and possibly in April, too, for Durango’s mayoral election. It’s the right thing to do, she said, and running a jail-based polling place costs her office no more than about $200 total — a far cry from the $2,000-per-voter price-tag that some opponents of SB 72 had predicted.

Molly Fitzpatrick, the clerk in Boulder County, said she’s also hoping to open a jail-based polling place outside of general elections in even-numbered years.

“It took a ton of planning, communication and coordination this first go-round, and I’m sure it will get easier each time we do it,” Fitzpatrick said.

As it inspires some local officials to make jail voting easier, Colorado’s new law is also resonating around the country. Advocates in New Mexico and Washington state tell Bolts they’re hopeful that those states will pass their own versions of SB 72 this year, and Giddings said he’s also been in touch with interested parties in the District of Columbia, Michigan, and Tennessee.

“I think this sets the stage for what’s possible,” said Carmen J. López, an expert on jail voting with the Sentencing Project. “Colorado is clearly the gold standard for how to do this with pretrial incarcerated voters.”

Lopez, Giddings and others said they hope that the rise in turnout from jails following SB 72 will, among other impacts, force officials around the country to see that persistently low participation by eligible incarcerated voters is a result of policy choices and not of voter disinterest.

“I think people would be surprised to know that those of us who are incarcerated really do actually pay attention to what’s going on out there,” said Jesus Rodriguez, who voted from Jefferson County’s jail in November, in a testimonial the county clerk’s office shared with Bolts. Rodriguez, who was 29 on Election Day last year, had never voted before because, he said, “I never thought it would mean much.”

“Even though it might not sound like much,” Rodriguez added, “it would be one of my top five experiences, being able to vote.”

This article was produced and originally published by Bolts, a nonprofit publication that covers criminal justice and voting rights in local governments. Read more at boltsmag.org.