By Myung Oak Kim and Bill Scanlon

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

Two of the largest metro counties — Jefferson and Denver — are finished with their unofficial vote counts.

But Adams County, Douglas, Arapahoe and Boulder are still counting this morning.

Boulder County is moving the slowest, with only about a third of ballots counted as of this morning. The culprit: tiny bits of dust that got in the ballots, interfering with the electronic scans.

Arapahoe County also hoped to get the votes counted by noon, said Mindy Edstrom, community services specialist. Five out of six voters had already mailed in their ballots or voted before Election Day.

One close race that could turn on the morning count is the Arapahoe County Board of Commissioners District 3 race where, as of late last night, Republican Rod Bockenfeld had a razor-thin lead over Democrat Martha Karnopp.

Jefferson County elections workers completed their tallies except for provisional ballots at 1:30 a.m. Turnout was high in that county, at about 91 percent of registered voters, according to figures from the Web site.

About 20,000 mail ballots were dropped off Tuesday in Jefferson County and voters cast just under 50,000 ballots at the polls, county officials said. The large majority of votes were by mail before Election Day. More than 337,000 Jeffco voters cast ballots in all.

Denver County finished its tally at 2:30 a.m. Their turnout was lower, with less than 265,000 ballots cast in all. That's about 65 percent of registered voters.

Both counties have thousands of provisional ballots to process in the next two weeks. Jeffco received about 4,800 of these ballots and Denver has about 11,000.

Provisional ballots must be investigated individually to make sure the voters are eligible to cast ballots in this election. The approved ballots will be added to the final count in the next two weeks.

The Rocky's Alan Gathright contributed to this report.