Douglas County, CO commissioners rewrote citizens' ballot petition and added a competing question

On August 28, 2026, the three Republican commissioners of Douglas County, Colorado -- Abe Laydon, George Teal, and Kevin Van Winkle -- rewrote the ballot title of a certified citizen petition to add cost-estimate framing its roughly 23,000 signers never saw, days after adopting a resolution that made themselves the panel that sets and hears protests of ballot titles. The petition, certified by the county clerk in August after spring signature-gathering, asked simply whether to expand the county board from three members to five; the commissioners' rewrite opened instead with "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" -- a figure county staff's own separate estimate put closer to $481,708 a year. On August 31, the board adopted a further resolution referring its own competing question to the same ballot, asking whether, if the board grows to five, all commissioners should continue to be elected countywide -- the one method of electing five commissioners the citizen petition does not offer voters.

Colorado law governing a shift from three to five county commissioners requires that voters be offered at least two methods of electing the expanded board; the citizen petition offered two, while the commissioners' own competing question offered only the at-large method already in use. The board's Aug. 25 resolution also set itself up, rather than the county clerk who had already certified the petition's wording, as the body that would rule on any challenge to the title it then rewrote.

Updates

2026-09-03 — Commissioners' own panel rejected challenges to both ballot titles [3, 4]

Petitioners challenged both the cost-estimate language the commissioners had added to the citizen petition and the wording of the commissioners' own competing question, bringing each challenge before the same three-member board that had authored the language, under the ballot-title-review power it had assigned itself by resolution. The board unanimously denied the challenge to the citizen-petition language on September 3, then voted 2-1 on September 4 to deny the separate challenge to its own competing question, clearing both measures for the November 3 ballot.

2026-09-12 — Judge declined to block either change before the election [1, 2]

State Rep. Bob Marshall sued the county, the three commissioners, and the clerk on September 7, 2026 to remove both changes before ballots printed. Douglas County District Judge Victoria Klingensmith held a hearing September 11 -- which she called "a crash course in election law" -- and ruled the next day that Marshall's challenge to the cost-estimate language came too late under the state's ballot-title statute, and that although the competing question's wording did not match the governing statute on electing five commissioners, no law gave her authority to fix a ballot question before an election, only after one. Marshall's window to seek review from the Colorado Supreme Court closed without a filing, and both commissioner-authored changes appear on the November ballot as written.