Colorado election officials are directing four counties to prevent ineligible votes from being counted on a proposed passenger-rail tax after about 800,000 voters received ballots that included the question by mistake. The Secretary of State’s Office issued guidance Wednesday night to Adams, Arapahoe, Douglas and Weld counties. It said votes on Issue 7A must not be tabulated if they were cast by voters who are not registered within the Front Range Passenger Rail District’s boundaries. The measure, scheduled for the November ballot, asks eligible voters whether to create a 0.333% sales and use tax. The district estimates the tax would generate $295 million a year and seeks authority to take on $580 million in debt to build a passenger rail line connecting communities along the Front Range. Only voters inside the district are eligible to decide the measure, but the question appeared on ballots sent to some voters elsewhere in the four counties. The state directed county officials to configure their election systems to count Issue 7A votes only from eligible voters and said testing those systems will be critical. The state plans to provide additional testing protocols. In most cases, officials can use ballot styles to distinguish eligible voters’ ballots from those sent to people outside the district. But voters in parts of Bow Mar, in Arapahoe County, and Sterling Ranch, in Douglas County, may receive the same ballot style despite differing eligibility for Issue 7A. In those areas, election workers will need to separate the affected ballot envelopes for hand review, the state said. Judd Choate, Colorado’s director of elections, said ballots from eligible voters will be processed normally. For ineligible voters, workers will verify signatures, remove the ballots from their envelopes and transfer votes to a ballot style that does not include Issue 7A. The required hand review is limited to sorting ballots in those jurisdictions; the state’s guidance does not call for a hand count of all the mistakenly distributed ballots.