Four counties count Ballot Issue 7A only for rail district voters

DENVER — Thirteen days before the Nov. 3 election, Adams, Arapahoe, Douglas and Weld counties are processing ballots under a plan to count Ballot Issue 7A only for voters who live inside the Front Range Passenger Rail District. About 835,000 voters outside the district received the question, according to county figures compiled by The Colorado Sun on Oct. 19: about 282,800 in Douglas, 274,000 in Adams, 262,000 in Arapahoe and 16,217 in Weld.

Issue 7A asks district voters to approve a 0.333% sales and use tax for passenger rail service and to let the district sell $580 million in bonds. Senate Bill 26-172 narrowed the district in May to 31 municipalities and the Sterling Ranch metropolitan districts, as an earlier Kim Monson Newsroom report detailed. Under state law, county clerks conduct November elections by mail, and the secretary of state certifies the rail district’s ballot content to each county in the district. In a joint statement, the Colorado Department of State and the Colorado County Clerks Association said voters “should vote the ballot they were sent” and that every other contest on an out-of-district ballot will count.

In an Oct. 7 letter, the department’s director of elections, Judd Choate, told the four counties, “Please program your voting systems (Liberty Vote or Clear Ballot) to count Ballot Issue 7A for only eligible voters in the district,” according to the Sun’s Oct. 8 report. State officials and the four counties met Oct. 9 and set testing protocols for that configuration, according to Colorado Politics.

In Arapahoe County, precincts where every voter wrongly received 7A are left out of the 7A results the county reports to the state, the Sun reported Oct. 19. Of 14 precincts split by the district line, the county has mailed replacement ballots to about 225 voters in four; in the other 10, where no printed ballot style fits, elections staff will pull every ballot from those precincts and count 7A only on the eligible ones. A notice from Arapahoe County Elections says about 340 Columbine Valley voters inside the district were mailed corrected ballots because theirs lacked 7A.

Denver7 reported that 7A appeared on every Douglas County ballot, although only Sterling Ranch residents were meant to receive it. Clerk and Recorder Sheri Davis said the county isolates eligible voters’ ballots into separate batches by voter ID at the envelope sorter. “We count batches that are for 7A, and then we turn off 7A for the rest of the batches,” Davis told the station.

James Wiley, the Republican nominee for Colorado secretary of state, said on The Kim Monson Show on Oct. 21 that the method concerns him more than the error. “And the solution is actually the biggest problem as far as I’m concerned,” Wiley said.

Arapahoe’s elections director says the district never sent its new boundary

Bill Mast, director of Arapahoe County’s election division, told the Sun that representatives of the rail district never notified the county of the new boundary. His office emailed and got no response, and the county used the map on the district’s website, which still showed the old boundaries. “We have a zero percent margin for error,” Mast said, adding that he expects no delay in reporting results.

In El Paso County, which is not among the four affected counties, Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker emailed the district’s general inbox on July 23 asking for updated boundaries and never heard back, according to The Denver Post. District General Manager Sal Pace told the Post the district had no record of the email and that not responding was an oversight. Pace said district staff met with the Colorado County Clerks Association and “a number” of county clerks in March about the boundary changes and followed up in April.

The district has since hired former Jefferson County Clerk Pam Anderson as an election advisor to coordinate with the counties. “The simplest message for voters is to vote their ballot,” Anderson told the Sun.

Colorado Election Rules assign ballot duplication to bipartisan boards

Where eligible and ineligible voters share a ballot style, state guidance has counties pull those envelopes for hand review. “Those ineligible will be signature verified, deconstructed, and then duplicated onto a ballot style that does not include 7A,” the guidance said, as quoted by Colorado Public Radio.

Rule 18 of the Department of State’s Election Rules, which governs ballot duplication, assigns the work to a resolution board that, in an election with partisan contests, must include at least two election judges from different major parties. The board numbers each original and its copy to match and signs a duplication log. Rule 8 of the same rules requires that election watchers be given access to signature verification, ballot duplication and tabulation.

Wiley calls for in-person precinct voting and paper ballots only

Wiley said the remedy shows that voting systems can be set to drop one contest for voters in certain areas. “Those machines could always discount certain races within certain geographies,” he said. “That doesn’t seem like something that I want as part of my election tabulation.”

“It’s just another symptom of a centralized election process, which creates massive vulnerabilities,” Wiley said, adding that when there are mistakes like this one, “it’s catastrophic across multiple counties.”

“If we had decentralized elections, which I’m going to bring back as secretary of state, problems like this would not exist,” he said.

His campaign platform calls for in-person voting in each precinct, paper ballots only and citizen-controlled ballot tabulation. Wiley said on the show that “centralization is always a path to inefficiency and failure.”

“I hope it dies in November like it should,” Wiley said of 7A.

Democrat Amanda Gonzalez, the Jefferson County clerk and recorder, is also running for secretary of state in the Nov. 3 election, according to a Colorado Politics report on her Oct. 10 debate with Wiley.

See Front Range Passenger Rail District Ballot Issue 7A in the 2026 Colorado Voter's Guide →