“This conversation is over”: Arapahoe County board chair shuts down residents’ election questions

By Heidi Ganahl | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

For nearly an hour Tuesday morning, Arapahoe County residents lined up at the Board of County Commissioners’ meeting room podium with one request, phrased a dozen ways: show us.

Show us the voter rolls. Show us the cast vote records. Let the candidates who lost look at the paper ballots from a single precinct and compare them to the machine count. Seat an independent commission. Don’t certify until the questions are answered.

When public comment ended, Board Chair Leslie Summey gave them her answer. It did not go well.

The chair loses the room

After the last speaker, Summey posed what she called a rhetorical question. “Were the results different, would you all be here?” When residents called back that they would, because “we want the transparency,” the chair shot back, “We have the transparency.” Then she said, “This conversation is over.”

It wasn’t. Over the next two minutes, according to the county’s own caption record, the chair told the room, “I don’t have the authority to do what you are asking us to do,” thanked one resident “for knowing my job better than I do,” and twice reminded them, “You did not elect me.” When a woman who has addressed the board for three years said she had never received a single answer, Summey replied, “You come all the time, honey. I’m talking to ya.” Told she was ignoring them, Summey responded, “I’m clearly not ignoring you because I have not kicked you out of the room.”

She then pronounced it “a very successful public comment that devolved at the end” and moved on to the rest of the agenda.

Not everyone on the dais agreed. Before adjournment, Commissioner Rhonda Fields, a fellow Democrat, reminded her colleagues that “anyone who comes to our public hearing needs to be treated with respect and dignity, when their views are different.”

Why Arapahoe stands out

Statewide, Proposition 134 (keeping girls’ sports for girls) and Proposition 135 (barring sex-change surgeries on minors) both passed with about 52 percent, according to unofficial Secretary of State results. Arapahoe rejected both of them. Proposition 134 fell short in the county by just 2,411 votes out of more than 263,000 cast; Proposition 135 by 4,900. Next door, Douglas County approved Proposition 134 with 63 percent.

Arapahoe joined 13 other counties, including Denver, Boulder and Jefferson, in voting no. But margins this thin are exactly where every batch, every signature check and every misprinted ballot counts. Patty McKernan, a Protect Kids Colorado board member who canvassed across the county, told commissioners the support she heard at the doors looked nothing like the tally. She put it at 70 percent in favor of the ballot measures.

What residents described

The complaints were concrete. This fall, roughly 800,000 voters in Adams, Arapahoe, Douglas and Weld counties received ballots carrying Issue 7A, a passenger-rail sales tax many of them weren’t eligible to vote on, forcing election officials to sort and, in some cases, duplicate ballots by hand. “Who is responsible?” asked Robin O’Meara, vice chair of the Arapahoe County Republicans.

Lynn Christiansen, a poll watcher, praised the staff as professional but said she could not observe the signature verification machines, the tabulators or the results transmitted to the state. Arapahoe County GOP Chairman John Temple, dressed in black “because I’m in mourning,” said he had sent four letters and a list of 1,100 questionable registrations without a response.

Modest asks

Annette Budd, who challenged Clerk Joan Lopez, proposed letting each candidate inspect all ballots from one precinct, or three for countywide races, without removing them from the warehouse, and compare them against the cast vote record. Assessor candidate Jesse Lind compared the process to a footrace run in a tunnel. “If there’s nothing to hide then why hide?” he asked. Jan Weipert proposed a citizen committee that would bring evidence to the board by Nov. 30 and requested a funded hand recount.

The board’s response

Commissioner Jessica Campbell dismissed the testimony as “nonfactual, incorrect statements,” pointed to Lopez’s reelection with 67.8 percent of the vote, and attributed the results to shifting demographics and a national Democratic wave. She added that many of the speakers had toured the election warehouse.

Maybe she’s right. Colorado already audits a random sample of ballots after every election. Budd’s request goes a step further, letting the candidates themselves pick a precinct and see every ballot in it. That precinct-level comparison of paper ballots to the cast vote record is precisely the kind of check that would prove her right, and it costs far less than the trust the county is spending by refusing.

In January, Colorado gets a new chief election official: Secretary of State-elect Amanda Gonzalez, who currently runs elections as Jefferson County clerk and recorder. Arapahoe’s voters will be watching whether she, and their own commissioners, answer “show us” with records, or with “this conversation is over.”

Quotes are drawn from Arapahoe County’s official auto-generated closed captions of the Nov. 10, 2026, business meeting (Granicus clip 1975). Vote totals are unofficial Secretary of State results as of Nov. 10.