By admin 
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.
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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.
Mast had followed the news of the legislature passing a bill in May that shrunk the borders of the Front Range Passenger Rail District, leaving residents in only certain portions of some counties eligible to vote on the tax increase. But Mast said representatives from the passenger rail district never notified the county of the new boundary. When his office reached out via email, he didn’t get a response, and the map on the district’s website still had the old boundaries, he said. So that’s what he went with.
He quickly reported the extent of the problem to the Secretary of State’s Office: 262,000 people in Arapahoe County who do not live within the special taxing district received ballots with question 7A on them.
It was up to the Front Range Passenger Rail District to decide whether to move forward with the vote.
“Once we got direction from the Secretary of State’s Office that we were going to move forward with counting, that the district was not going to be withdrawing their content, that’s when we had to start troubleshooting on how we remedy this,” he said.
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For precincts in Arapahoe County in which all voters mistakenly received 7A on their ballots, the solution is simple. In the application used to report results to the Secretary of State’s Office, the elections staff, when reporting 7A results, can simply not include those precincts, no matter what voters mark on their ballots. Precincts are small areas within counties used for organizing elections.
That fix filters out most voters who shouldn’t have received the question.
What would a sales tax increase to pay for a Front Range passenger train cost you?
Ballot Issue 7A would add a 0.333% sales tax in the Front Range Passenger Rail District — about 33 cents on every $100 of taxable purchases. Enter what you spend in a year to see the added cost.
Everyday taxable purchases — not rent, most groceries, or other items exempt from state sales tax. Drag the slider or type an amount.
How this works: Ballot Issue 7A would add 0.333 percentage points — about 33 cents on every $100 — on top of the state and local sales tax you already pay. It applies only when you buy something inside the Front Range Passenger Rail District, or when someone who lives in the district buys online. (Calculator created by Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)
But for 14 Arapahoe County precincts where some voters are inside the Front Range Passenger Rail District and some are not, called split precincts, it’s a bit more tricky.
Each ballot has a precinct number and a ballot style number on it. The ballot style number indicates which questions are on the ballot based on where the voter lives. In Arapahoe County, on the top right corner of the ballot there is a three-digit number indicating the last three numbers of the precinct and then a dash and then a two-digit number indicating the ballot style.
For four of the split precincts where some voters received 7A mistakenly, about 225 people, the county has already sent them a replacement ballot.
But for the other 10 split precincts, the Arapahoe County elections division does not have a style of ballot already printed that can be sent because there are too many complications such as races that are specific to certain neighborhoods or blocks. Elections staff will take all the ballots in those precincts and separate out the valid ones. Only votes from eligible ballots will be counted for 7A.
If it seems complicated, it is. But Mast is confident the extra steps are doable and will not result in reporting delays.
“We have a zero percent margin for error,” Mast said.
The Front Range Passenger Rail District hired former Jefferson County Clerk Pam Anderson last week as an election advisor to help coordinate with the counties.
“The simplest message for voters is to vote their ballot,” Anderson said. “Colorado elections officials are doing everything they need to do to make sure those ballots are counted accurately and transparently.”