Douglas County Colorado Voter Guide 2026: Every Race and Measure on the November 3 Ballot

Your ballot was mailed Friday, October 2. If it is not on your kitchen counter yet it is in a truck, and the county says to call 303-660-7444 if nothing has arrived by October 14. The question is no longer what is coming, but what to do with the thing in your hands.

The short answer: vote the parts you have an opinion about, sign the outside of the envelope, and drop it in one of 23 boxes that stay open around the clock until 7 p.m. Tuesday, November 3. Leaving a question blank does not void the rest. Then sign up for BallotTrax, because the one deadline that can quietly cost you your vote is the signature cure deadline, and it falls after Election Day.

What you are actually holding

The county's composite sample ballot for November 3 runs to seven pairs of names for governor, 14 statewide measures, seven county offices, a school tax, 13 judges, and three separate questions about how many commissioners you should have. Yours will be shorter, because you only get the districts you live in. Every race below has a card, and most now have a page of their own.

Jump to: Governor and statewide · Congress · Legislature · County offices · Questions 200, 201, 1A · The 14 statewide measures · School tax 5A · Towns and districts · Judges

Statewide: governor, Senate and three open offices

New this week: How low can Victor Marx go? The Republican share of the county's governor vote fell from 59.07 percent in 2014 to 49.46 in 2022, and Marx lost this county's own Republican primary. We work the arithmetic on the floor.

Congress: two districts, one county

State legislature

You get one Senate district and one House district, by address. June primary results for each.

Douglas County offices

Seven county offices are on this ballot, and every county voter gets all of them. (A correction to our June guide, which said these were not up until 2028.)

New this week, one profile each. Who is Jake Bockenfeld? The concrete executive who has never held office, opposes adding two seats to the board he wants to join, and called new arrivals locusts. Who is Irene Bonham? The Parker nonprofit leader who helped beat the commissioners' home rule plan in 2025, with her platform and her money.

Questions 200, 201 and 1A: the commission-expansion fight

Three questions are tangled together and one was litigated. The full explainer, with the four ways to vote them without contradicting yourself, is here.

They started with a resident petition drive, 3 to 5 Douglas County, organized by Angela Thomas with about 80 volunteer circulators. It needed 15,046 valid signatures by August 1, turned in more than 20,000, and the clerk certified it in mid-August.

The three questions

• Question 200: shall the board grow from three commissioners to five? The wording you will see is not the petition's. On August 28 the commissioners set a ballot title that opens with a fiscal note: "At an ongoing estimated annual expense of $760,000 to $1,300,000 from County revenue that supports public safety, transportation, and essential county services..." Yes expands the board; no keeps three.
• Question 201: only matters if 200 passes. Pick a method: five commissioners each elected only by their own district, or three district commissioners plus two at-large seats elected countywide.
• Question 1A: the commissioners' own addition, referred unanimously on August 31: if the board grows to five, "shall all registered Douglas County voters continue to elect all County Commissioners?" Read next to 201, where both options include district-only voting, and you can see the collision. Nobody with authority has said which controls if both pass.

The fight, and the ruling

The board denied the petition representatives' protest of the fiscal-note title unanimously on September 3, then denied a second protest seeking to strike 1A, 2-1, on September 4. Rep. Bob Marshall sued on September 8. Commissioner Kevin Van Winkle called the challenge politically motivated and said residents deserve "full financial transparency"; Commissioner Abe Laydon said the board followed its lawyers' advice; Chairman George Teal declined comment.

Judge Victoria Klingensmith denied the injunction on September 11 and denied reconsideration days later, ruling that courts cannot change or remove questions before an election. She did not find the wording lawful. All three appear on the ballot in your hands exactly as the commissioners wrote them. Our full account of the ruling.

The 14 statewide measures

Amendments 81 through 86 need 55 percent; Amendment 87 only repeals constitutional language, so a simple majority carries it, as with the propositions. Each has a Douglas County page in our statewide measures guide, and the four that move money are in the household calculator.

Constitutional amendments (55 percent to pass, except 87)

• [Amendment 81](/news/what-does-amendment-81-mean-for-douglas-county): law enforcement must notify Homeland Security when someone charged with a violent crime (or any crime, with a prior felony) cannot be confirmed as lawfully present.
• [Amendment 82](/news/what-does-amendment-82-mean-for-douglas-county): a constitutional right to buy and sell natural gas for cooking and heating.
• Amendment 83: a constitutional right to hunt and fish, as the preferred wildlife-management tool.
• [Amendment 84](/news/what-does-amendment-84-mean-for-douglas-county): the last four of your Social Security or driver's license number on the outside of your mail ballot envelope, with a cure process.
• Amendment 85: all ballot questions in plain language at an 8th-grade reading level.
• Amendment 86: lock the current congressional redistricting process into the constitution and restrict late changes to final maps.
• [Amendment 87](/news/what-does-amendment-87-mean-for-douglas-county): replace the flat income tax with a graduated one, raising about $2.7 billion a year by the ballot's own statement; cuts under $500,000 of taxable income, increases above it.

Propositions (simple majority)

• Proposition 132: stiffer felony classifications and mandated treatment for fentanyl offenses.
• Proposition 133: life without parole for trafficking a minor, expanded to buyers.
• [Proposition 134](/news/what-does-proposition-134-mean-for-douglas-county): school and college sports teams designated male, female or coed, with participation by biological sex.
• [Proposition 135](/news/what-does-proposition-135-mean-for-douglas-county): prohibit surgeries on minors to alter sex characteristics, and bar public or insurance funding for them.
• [Proposition 136](/news/what-does-proposition-136-mean-for-douglas-county): cap the state income tax rate at 4.4 percent; it exists to block Amendment 87.
• [Proposition 137](/news/what-does-proposition-137-mean-for-douglas-county): let the state keep about $175 million a year of sporting-goods sales tax for water, land and wildfire.
• [Proposition NN](/news/what-does-proposition-nn-mean-for-douglas-county) (the legislature's referral): grow state K-12 spending 2 percent a year for ten years by raising the TABOR cap, no new tax, smaller refunds.

Ballot Issue 5A: DCSD's $54 million mill levy override

The school board voted 7-0 on August 25 to send this to you. What it costs your house, by home value.

The case for: the district says it pays below neighboring districts and has been plugging a $22 million budget gap with one-time reserves. The case against, as voiced at the board meeting: property taxes are already high and enrollment is declining. Board secretary Kyrzia Parker said the increase "might break some people" before voting yes. A real pay gap against a real affordability squeeze, and no way to vote for both.

Towns and special districts

Local questions, by district

• Castle Pines, Questions 300 and 301: charter amendments requiring a citywide vote before the city annexes any property over 20 acres under common ownership (serial annexations counted together), and sending any such annexation completed within 180 days of passage back to voters.
• Larkspur Fire Protection District, 6A and 6B: a 3.97-mill increase (about $925,000 a year for staffing and fleet) and $4.5 million in debt for apparatus and a future station.
• Sterling Ranch only, Ballot Issue 7A: the 0.333 percent sales tax and $580 million in debt for Front Range Passenger Rail. A law signed in May shrank the rail district to the route cities plus, in Douglas County, the Sterling Ranch metro district. Sterling Ranch votes on a train; nobody else here is supposed to, but on October 6 the Secretary of State confirmed 7A was printed on some Douglas County ballots outside the district by mistake. What we know so far.
• Also on some ballots: the Douglas County slice of Aurora votes on Aurora's 3A, 3B and 3C, three new sales taxes of 0.129, 0.064 and 0.132 percent for community facilities, public safety facilities and transportation, each paired with debt ($105 million, $53 million and $108 million), plus 3D, moving Aurora's city elections to even-numbered years. Stone Creek Metropolitan District voters get Questions 6C through 6G, repealing unused debt and four spending authorizations approved by three voters in 2014. Conifer Fire Protection District's 7D is a 4.0-mill increase raising $400,000 a year, and West Metro Fire Protection District's 7C is a 0.75 percent sales tax, excluding groceries, gas and medicine, raising up to $36.3 million in 2027.
• Lone Tree and Highlands Ranch: nothing local this November. Lone Tree voted in May, and HRCA runs its own delegate elections.

Judges: 13 names, yes or no on each

Thirteen judges are on your ballot with no opponent and no campaign, just "shall Judge So-and-so be retained in office?" All 13 were rated "Meets Performance Standards": the State Commission evaluates the appellate judges, the 23rd Judicial District Commission the district and county judges.

The full list: Supreme Court Justice William W. Hood III; Court of Appeals Judges Rebecca Rankin Freyre, Elizabeth L. Harris, Katharine E. Lum, Pax Moultrie, Karl L. Schock and Grant Sullivan; 23rd Judicial District Judges Andrew Baum, Victoria E. Klingensmith, Theresa Slade and Daniel W. Warhola; Douglas County Court Judges Lawrence Bowling and Kolony L. Fields.

Twelve of the thirteen findings were unanimous. The exception is Klingensmith, found to meet standards on a 6-1 vote; she is also the judge who twice declined to alter the commissioners' wording of Questions 200 and 1A. Warhola's 6-0 came with one commissioner recused.

Every judge, what the commission wrote, and the survey numbers behind each vote. Our read: since all thirteen passed, the label tells you little; the vote count and the number of survey respondents tell you more.

We do not endorse candidates. Campaigns can send corrections to hello@discoverdougco.com.