Arapahoe County Sorts 835,000 Erroneous Front Range Rail Ballots

“A fair amount of heartburn, but that’s the role,” said Bill Mast, director of Arapahoe County’s election division. He was speaking about the logistical nightmare currently unfolding in Littleton, where his team is tasked with untangling a ballot error that has sent the Front Range Passenger Rail District’s Issue 7A to roughly 835,000 voters who are not legally eligible to vote on it.

The mistake is massive in scale, affecting Douglas, Weld, Adams, and Arapahoe counties. For folks around here in Arapahoe, the error means about 262,000 voters received a ballot with a question that doesn’t apply to their address. The issue at stake is a sales tax increase — 33 cents on every $100 spent inside the district — to fund more frequent train service between Pueblo and Fort Collins. If you look closely at the numbers, about 282,800 voters in Douglas County got the question by mistake, along with 274,000 in Adams and a smaller slice of 16,217 in Weld.

The heartburn isn’t just about the volume; it’s about the precision required to fix it. Inside the Arapahoe County election warehouse, a recent weekday morning felt less like an office and more like a high-stakes sorting facility. Workers in bright yellow vests moved with deliberate care, unpacking ballots from drop boxes. They aligned every envelope to face the same direction before placing them into trays for weighing. The air hummed with the quiet, rhythmic shuffle of paper and plastic, a tactile reminder that democracy here is often just manual labor.

Mast initially thought his problem was small. In late September, he discovered that about 318 voters in Columbine Valley were missing the question entirely. That was a straightforward fix: send notices and replacement ballots. The rule is simple, if a voter returns two ballots, the one with 7A counts; if they return only the ballot without it, their votes for other races still count. But then the Secretary of State’s Office called on Oct. 6 to alert him that other counties had made the same error, and in reverse. It didn’t take long for Mast to realize Arapahoe County had mailed the question to people who shouldn’t have it.

The confusion stems from a bill passed in May that shrunk the borders of the Front Range Passenger Rail District. The new boundaries leave only certain portions of some counties eligible to vote on the tax increase. Mast noted that representatives from the passenger rail district never clearly communicated this shift to election staff, leaving counties to navigate a moving target. Now, the county can’t start counting votes until Oct. 19, but the process to resolve the issue is already in full swing.

It’s a reminder that while we think of voting as a private, individual act, it is deeply administrative. The weight of those trays in the warehouse isn’t just paper; it’s the burden of ensuring that a vote from a resident outside the district doesn’t accidentally tip the scale for those inside it. As the workers continue their careful sorting, the silence of the room is punctuated only by the soft thud of ballots hitting the trays, a steady, unglamorous heartbeat keeping the election honest.