Voters weigh in to help shape coverage of Colorado’s election races

The November election is approaching quickly — so quickly that Colorado’s ballots will begin arriving in mailboxes just two weeks from now.

The Denver Post’ staff is now at work on our fall election coverage. Our aim, as always, is to inform readers about the candidates, the ballot measures they’ll decide and the major issues that are playing into races.

But to focus our coverage this year, we’ve relied on your input more than ever.

The Denver Post is among dozens of newsrooms statewide that joined together in the spring to launch the Voter Voices project through the Colorado News Collaborative. The keystone is a survey that asks voters to identify the most important issues to them — and to answer this question: “What would you like candidates to talk about as they compete for your vote?”

More than 6,100 Coloradans have already weighed in. It’s not too late to tell us what you think.

So far, we’ve heard again and again that readers are attuned to democracy and good government, and they want to know how candidates are talking about that topic. They want to hear candidates’ ideas for addressing Colorado’s rising cost of living and its housing shortage. They want to know about plans to address climate change, while also caring about the state’s natural resources and how they are used.

While liberal, moderate and conservative respondents differ in some of their priorities, immigration rates highly among many who want to hear more border security solutions from candidates. Others are particularly attuned to abortion in the new legal world of the last two years, especially with an abortion rights amendment on Colorado’s ballot.

That input helped shape the questions we recently asked candidates on questionnaires, from metro Denver county commissioner races to the state’s eight congressional contests. We’ll publish their Q&A responses in our online voter guide by mid-October, as ballots are landing in your hands.

In coming weeks, as we also report on the politics of the election, The Post will join with COLab to dive deeper into all of those topics above, among others. We’ll explore how they’re cutting across races and explain where to look on your ballot if a given issue is important to you.