Earlier this year, Ark Valley Voice (AVV) made a commitment to our readers for what we called “engaged elections”. Our coverage of this year’s elections would be grounded in what voters want candidates to discuss as they compete for votes. Not what the candidates want to talk about. We joined newsrooms across the state in an unprecedented team effort we call Voter Voices 2024, to do something that we may not do often enough: listen.

While the survey will be up through the June Primary election, AVV has received some initial data about concerns voiced by residents of this county that can be shared.

We note that while there were several topics that rose to the list of voters’ top three concerns (in fact the survey offers 13 umbrella “buckets” from which to select), the data revealed something important. Half of our survey respondents chose one topic over all the others as their chief area of concern: “Democracy and good government”.

Not only was this the number one issue for respondents to the survey attached to AVV’s newsroom, it appears that the topic of democracy was the number one issue for respondents across the entire state of Colorado. Interestingly enough here in this county, respondents who selected this category were not a monolith; they identified as moderate, liberal and conservative.