“Everybody knows we have to make a decision quickly, and the clerks are supporting vote by mail — and they have a lot of influence,” said Senator Ken Gordon, a Denver Democrat who is majority leader in the State Senate and who is a co-chairman of a bipartisan legislative task force on the ballot troubles.

The secretary of state, Mike Coffman, a Republican who favors allowing paper ballots and electronic machines, said in an interview that he thought the technical issues that his office found could be addressed in time for the election — though legislative action would be required to hasten the process.

In any case, Mr. Coffman said, some electronic equipment that did not pass muster in his tests would have to be recertified, even in an all mail-in election, if only to scan all those paper ballots. A spokesman for Gov. Bill Ritter Jr., a Democrat, said that the governor wanted all options on the table, but that the county clerks, as the state’s front-line elections officials, must be consulted.

“Today, nothing would be ruled out,” said Evan Dreyer, Mr. Ritter’s spokesman. “We absolutely must get this right.”

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The county clerks, meanwhile, are divided over whether the solution should be one-size-fits-all — requiring each of the state’s 64 counties to conduct the vote in the same way — or whether each county should have discretion over the mix of mail-in and on-site polling.

Strange bedfellows abound. One of the state’s most urban and Democratic counties, Denver, has aligned with some of the most rural and Republican counties in raising concerns about a mandatory all-mail system. Denver’s city clerk, Stephanie Y. O’Malley, said at Tuesday’s hearing that many Denver residents simply would not vote by mail. Some rural counties have never done much mail-in voting at all.

“I think the best way for Colorado is to have multiple ways to vote, as we currently do,” said Representative David G. Balmer, the deputy minority leader in the State House of Representatives, a Republican from the Denver suburbs and co-chairman of the ballot task force. “Some people like to vote on Election Day at polling places, and we should maintain that option. Others prefer absentee voting by mail, and we should maintain that option. We don’t want to jump to an all-one system.”

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But if each county is allowed to choose the best process, who will decide — the clerks, the county commissioners or someone else? Would such a system keep politics out of the process or politicize it even more?

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“It’s going to be a challenging discussion,” Mr. Balmer said.

Some clerks, meanwhile, worry that the legislature will get bogged down in trying to come up with a permanent new elections system in one year.

“We have to craft solutions that are one-time stopgap measures to get us through 2008, then we look for the long-term answers,” said Josh Liss, the deputy clerk of elections in Jefferson County, just west of Denver. “We’re not proposing permanent all-mail, and we’re not talking forever.”

Mr. Coffman, the secretary of state, said that the legislature and the governor would probably choose mandatory all-mail balloting and that it was likely to be a permanent change.

“They’re saying it’s for one year,” Mr. Coffman said. “But I think once it’s done, it’s done.”

But even some clerks who support an all-mail system this year say they are not sure about the long run. In 2002, Colorado voters had an opportunity to approve the path toward mail-in ballots with a measure called Amendment 28, which was resoundingly defeated.

That defeat “probably needs to be considered” said Nancy Doty, the clerk and recorder for Arapahoe County, south of Denver.