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Denver — Last-minute ballots streamed into county clerks' offices around the state Tuesday, but many counties still expected overall turnout to be well below 50 percent.

Results are not expected to be released until after the polls close at 7 p.m.

Boulder County was projecting a final turnout of around 35 percent. Denver and Jefferson counties expected a turnout around 25 percent.

Josh Liss, the deputy of elections for Jefferson County, said the turnout this year was in-line with similar odd-year elections following presidential elections.

"It's lower than we'd like, obviously," Liss said, "but not entirely abnormal."

Part of the reason for the low turnout, Liss said, was the huge interest in the 2008 election - when more than 90 percent of the state's active voters cast a ballot.

Registration drives in the run-up to the election swelled the state's voting rolls. Clerks, then, sent out large numbers of ballots for this year's mail-ballot-only election. But a number of voters on the election rolls may have since moved - meaning they wouldn't have automatically received a mail-in ballot this year - or lost interest.

Also keeping turnout lower this year may have been the absence of a statewide issue to drive voter interest, said Boulder County Clerk's spokeswoman Jessie Cornelius, who added that the county received a stream of last-minute ballots throughout the day.

"Our ballot drop offs have been steadily busy throughout the day," she said.

In El Paso County, elections manager Liz Olson credited two tax-related ballot measures with pushing the county's turnout figure into the high-30 percent range.

"I'm sure that probably drew voters out," she said.

The slow-but-steady turnout meant clerks reported few problems keeping up with ballot processing and counting.

"We've gotten a lot (of ballots) back in the last two days, but we're doing fine," Olson said.

Secretary of State Bernie Buescher visited four metro-area counties Tuesday afternoon to observe their vote-counting procedures and said he saw no back-ups or other problems. Buescher said volunteers in the counties were moving efficiently in verifying signatures on incoming ballots and scanning them. The counties, he said, were "ahead of the curve" for the final vote-tallying Tuesday night.

"It's just been very, very workmanlike," Buescher said. "They'll all current. None of them are running behind."

John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com.