Issue 7A ballot error forces Arapahoe County to separate valid votes by hand

By Taylor Dolven | The Colorado Sun

It’s hard to remember a bigger election season screwup than the one currently facing four Colorado counties that mistakenly mailed ballots with a question on them to about 835,000 voters who are ineligible to vote on that issue.

The ballot question in question is Issue 7A: whether to raise the sales tax inside the Front Range Passenger Rail District to fund more frequent and expanded train service between Pueblo and Fort Collins. If passed, a $100 purchase inside the district — about 30 communities from 13 counties along the planned train route — would come with a 33-cent sales tax increase.

For elections staff in Douglas, Weld, Adams and Arapahoe counties, the error means quite a few extra steps must be taken to ensure only valid votes on the issue are counted. About 282,800 voters in Douglas, 274,000 in Adams, 262,000 in Arapahoe and 16,217 in Weld counties got the 7A question by mistake.

“It definitely gives us a fair amount of heartburn, but that’s the role,” said Bill Mast, the director of Arapahoe County’s election division. “We deal with issues that come up.”

Inside the Arapahoe County election warehouse on a recent weekday morning, workers in yellow vests carefully unpacked ballots from drop boxes, made sure they were all facing the same direction and placed them into trays to be weighed.

The county can’t start counting votes until Oct. 19. But processes to resolve the Front Range Passenger Rail District issue are already in full swing. 

At first, Mast thought he had a very small problem on his hands. In late September, he learned that about 318 voters in Columbine Valley who should have received question 7A on their ballots did not. For that, there’s an easy fix: send those voters notices about the error and replacement ballots. If they return two ballots, the one with 7A on it will be counted. If they only return the ballot without 7A, all the races on that ballot will be counted, they just will not get to vote on 7A.

But Mast realized something bigger was amiss when he got a call from the Secretary of State’s Office on Oct. 6 alerting him that other counties had sent voters the 7A question mistakenly. It didn’t take him long to figure out that Arapahoe County had too.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE COLORADO SUN