Thousands of Gilpin County voters have received the wrong instructions about how to vote in next month’s election with ballots that were mailed out this week.

Those voters were told to enclose a copy of an identification card with their mail-in ballots for their vote to be valid. But Dwight Shellman with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said that’s wrong.

“That was actually in error,” he said. “The law requires [only] certain voters to enclose a photocopy of an acceptable form of identification when they return that ballot.”

Gilpen County includes the gambling towns of Central City and Black Hawk.

The ID instructions that Gilpin County Clerk Colleen Stewart’s office sent out to the county’s nearly 4,400 registered voters stated that voters needed to make a photocopy of their ID and place it in the mail ballot or the vote wouldn’t count.

But Shellman said that only applies to newly registered voters. In Gilpin County, only eight people should have received the ID instruction, not all 4,400 registered voters.

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