Fort Collins’ first major-ranked voting contest produced a clear outcome and left election officials focused on audits and future education.

Larimer County election staff said the county is still running and certifying the election and will conduct two separate risk‑limiting audits: a one‑day audit of the regular targeted contests and a separate one‑day audit focused on the ranked‑voting contests. "Ranked voting is complex and it's a highly technical, election model," a county election official said, emphasizing that planning, programming and testing took more than a year and required new logic‑and‑accuracy testing and a voter‑intent adjudication guide.

Eric Bridal, an advocate with Ranked Choice Voting for Colorado who helped run outreach, said turnout for the coordinated municipal election was 49%, unusually high for local contests, and described the mayoral contest’s six elimination rounds. "In the end, there were 46,000 votes for [the finalists] and 6,474 exhausted ballots," Bridal said, adding that most eliminated‑candidate transfers favored the eventual winner.

Elections staff said system limits constrained rankings to 10 per race; Fort Collins’ seven‑candidate mayoral contest allowed voters to rank all candidates. Officials also noted roughly 3,700 ballots that left the mayoral race blank and said they will analyze cast‑vote records (CVRs) after certification to study ballot‑marking patterns and transfer behavior.

Boulder League representative Neil McBurnett welcomed the decision to show each elimination round and urged public access to the full CVR for reproducing results: "We were very happy that Boulder provided a full cast‑vote record," he said, noting that unredacted CVRs helped reproduce and validate tabulations in prior RCV contests.

Officials said the separate seed and two‑day audit approach reflects the large sample the county will audit ("almost 500 ballots" cited for the ranked contest), and that the county coordinated closely with the Secretary of State’s technical team to adapt risk‑limiting audit software for ranked contests.

The county plans a debrief and to share lessons learned with other counties; staff cautioned that the administration and audit of ranked contests require substantial county resources and training for election judges. The county does not expect major problems but will finalize analyses and the certification following the audits.