Some Douglas County Voters Got a Train Tax on Their Ballot. They Were Not Supposed To.

If your Douglas County ballot has a question about a train on it and you do not live in Sterling Ranch, you are looking at a mistake. Not yours. The Colorado Secretary of State's Office confirmed to 9NEWS on Tuesday evening that voters in Douglas, Adams, Arapahoe and Weld counties who should not have Ballot Issue 7A on their ballots do have it, and the county clerks are still working out how many ballots are affected.

What 7A is

The Front Range Passenger Rail District wants to run a train called the Colorado Connector from Pueblo to Fort Collins, with a stop in Sterling Ranch between Colorado Springs and Littleton. To pay for it, the district's board voted on August 28 to put a tax question to its voters: a one-third-of-a-penny sales tax, which the ballot language says would raise $295 million a year, plus $580 million in borrowing with a total repayment cost of $785 million. Groceries, gasoline, home utilities and prescriptions are exempt. 9NEWS puts the cost at 10 cents on a $30 purchase. Our full breakdown of 7A is on the statewide measures page.

Why most of Douglas County is not supposed to see it

Because the legislature redrew the district this spring. Senate Bill 172, signed in May, shrank the rail district to 31 cities along the route plus, in Douglas County, the Sterling Ranch Metropolitan District. Castle Rock and Lone Tree came out. Highlands Ranch, Parker and most unincorporated Douglas County are out too. The sponsor's logic, as the Colorado Sun reported it, was to keep the cities where at least a fifth of residents live within five miles of a planned station.

The detail that stings now: one reason lawmakers gave for the redraw was that county clerks had said the old boundaries "are too difficult to use for elections." The new, simpler boundary is the one that got printed wrong.

What went wrong

A ballot is assembled by style. Every address in the county gets a ballot carrying exactly the races and questions that address is eligible for; Weld County alone has 443 styles, its clerk told 9NEWS last month. 7A was supposed to appear on the Sterling Ranch styles and no others. According to the Secretary of State's Office, as reported by 9NEWS, the office confirms the wording of each ballot issue before printing, but the clerks "should have worked with FRPRD to get the accurate boundary." Somewhere between the district's map and the county's styles, 7A landed on ballots it did not belong on, in four of the thirteen counties.

Douglas County mailed ballots on October 2. They were already in mailboxes when the error surfaced.

What we do not know

• How many Douglas County ballots carry 7A in error, and which neighborhoods.
• Whether those voters will receive a corrected ballot, or an instruction to leave 7A blank, or whether the clerks will simply not count 7A votes from outside the district.
• Whether the error affects the Sterling Ranch ballots themselves. Nothing in the reporting so far says it does.
• Who, between the clerks, the Secretary of State and the rail district, owns the mistake. So far only the Secretary of State's Office has spoken, and it pointed at the clerks.

Nothing in 9NEWS's report or the Secretary of State's confirmation suggests any other race or question on the ballot is affected.

If 7A is on your ballot

If you live in Sterling Ranch, 7A is yours to vote on. If you live anywhere else in Douglas County and 7A is printed on your ballot, you are one of the voters this story is about. We would hold off on marking it until the Clerk and Recorder says how those votes will be handled; the rest of the ballot does not need to wait for that. The clerk's office is at 303-660-7444 and douglasco.gov/elections. We will update this page when the county says how many ballots are affected and what it intends to do.

More: every race and measure on your ballot, the November ballot guide, and your sample ballot line by line.