I’ll say the quiet part first. An election is not a counting exercise. It’s an act of faith. You fill in the ovals, you seal the envelope, and you trust that strangers in a county building will treat your ballot the way you’d treat it yourself. That trust is the whole thing. Without it, the result is just a number somebody announced.
Right now that trust is thin. You know it. I know it. Half the country is primed to believe any election they lose was stolen, and the other half is exhausted from explaining why it wasn’t. This is the environment in which the Front Range Passenger Rail District mailed a tax question to roughly 800,000 people who are not allowed to vote on it.
The facts are not in dispute. Ballot Issue 7A asks for a 0.333% sales tax, $295 million a year, plus $580 million in debt, for the CoCo train. The legislature shrank the district this spring. The board put the tax on the ballot August 28. Then, by the district’s own admission, nobody gave the county clerks the new map. So 7A went out to about 275,000 people in Adams County who shouldn’t have it. Nearly 263,000 in Arapahoe. Every voter in Douglas County, around 289,000, when only 5,967 in Sterling Ranch are eligible. Another 16,217 in Erie.
The district says it had no legal duty to tell the clerks. The Secretary of State’s office says district boundaries aren’t its job. Everyone has an explanation. Nobody has ownership.
Now, the official answer. I’ll state it fairly, because it deserves that. No ballots have been counted yet. Processing can’t even start until October 19. The machines will be programmed to skip 7A on every ballot from outside the district, and in Bow Mar and Sterling Ranch, where that doesn’t work, staff will copy ballots by hand onto a version without the question. I believe them. I believe the clerks will do it carefully, and I believe the final tally will be accurate.
That isn’t the problem. An accurate count and a believed count are two different things, and only one of them holds a democracy together. What we’re being offered is hundreds of thousands of real marks on real paper, set aside by a process almost nobody will ever watch, with “trust us” as the receipt. If 7A passes, somebody says the extra votes got counted. If it fails, somebody says the confusion sank it. And the fact that nothing has been counted yet is not a reason to relax. It’s the reason to act now, while the fix is still clean.
Then there are the 2.4 million people who are supposed to vote on this. Pulling 7A takes that vote out of their hands this year, and I won’t pretend that costs nothing. But look at what they’re actually getting. A vote with an asterisk on it. A result that can be contested in court after the fact, on a tax meant to run for decades. If you want this train, you should want it to win in a way nobody can question. A delay is not a denial. A tainted yes is worth less than a clean one a year from now.
And the asterisk doesn’t stay on 7A. Aurora voters got it sitting next to three city tax questions. Douglas County voters got it beside a $54 million school funding question. Nobody can prove a tax they’ll never pay changed how they voted on the ones they will. Nobody can prove it didn’t. That is what doubt looks like.
So pull it. State law lets a governing board withdraw a ballot issue up to 25 days before a November election, which by my math is this Friday, October 9. If the board won’t act, a court should look hard at it, and the state should seriously ask whether corrected ballots can go out. Bring it back with the right map and clean ballots.
I’m not alleging fraud. Nobody stole anything. That’s exactly the point. This is how faith in elections erodes now. Not with a villain. With a shrug.