What to know:
- Arapahoe County Elections won a national award for collaborating with neighboring counties.
- Arapahoe County co-manages several vote centers and ballot boxes with Adams and Denver counties.
- Nearly 47,000 voters used a shared 24-hour drop box or vote center in 2024.
The Elections Center, a national association of elections officials, recently honored Arapahoe County for working with Adams and Denver counties to serve voters along their borders. The counties partner on vote centers such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Library location in Aurora, which borders all three counties) and many co-branded 24-hour ballot drop boxes.
Co-managed vote centers allow voters from any surrounding county to vote their unique ballot, rather than a provisional or statewide ballot that wouldn’t contain contests specific to voters’ precincts. Similarly, voters who return their mail ballot to a co-branded 24-hour ballot drop box can rest assured their ballot will be delivered to their home county.
Data from 2024 show the partnerships work. During three elections last year, 2,794 in-person voters cast ballots at these co-managed VSPCs. More than 44,000 voters used 24-hour drop boxes co-branded by Arapahoe, Adams and Denver counties.
Arapahoe County Elections Director Bill Mast joined Adams and Denver County elections representatives at a conference in Arkansas last month to provide details from their winning Professional Practice Paper, "Prioritizing Voters over County Lines,” and offer insight to counties across the United States considering similar partnerships.
“We all have the same goal of making voting as easy as possible,” Mast said. “It makes sense to be good neighbors and good partners.”