by Dale Gassett

Our “absentee ballots for all” system is not secure at all. 

Before Covid, when Vermont voters mostly cast our ballots in person at the polling place, one could argue, especially in our small towns, that election officials would recognize everybody when they checked in with an election official to get their ballot. And those voters who wanted to vote absentee had to request a ballot directly from local election officials, so officials could be reasonably sure that only ballots were being sent to voters who intended to use them. 

But all that changed in 2020 with temporary emergency Covid procedures, which the legislature made permanent in 2021, making it policy for the state to mail out live absentee ballots to every voter on the statewide checklist regardless of request. The problem is that lawmakers did this without creating any new security measures to ensure the new system is free from fraud. This was and is incredibly dangerous. A bill just put into the legislature, H.670 – an act requiring voters to present ID when voting, is necessary to help fix this problem. 

What happens now is a central office, the Secretary of State (not local election officials), mails absentee ballots out to every voter on the checklist without request — about a half a million live ballots. So, around 150,000 of those ballots are destined for people who will not vote, either because they died, moved away, or just choose not to vote. And because  Vermont has no ID verification mechanism for these ballots – none — anyone can collect  those unwanted and unclaimed ballots, or steal wanted ones, fill them out, sign the name  of the person to whom they were addressed (no need to forge a signature; we don’t have  signature check either), and submit them by mail or in a drop box. All this happens entirely outside the oversight of any local election officials, so no questions asked. 

When pressed, election officials, town and city clerks, admit that with our current system they have no way of detecting, let alone stopping, absentee ballot fraud from taking place in Vermont. Giving official testimony before the Vermont House and Senate Government  Operations Committees, the then Director of Elections stated flat out, if someone got hold  of another person’s ballot, filled it out, and mailed it in that ballot “will be processed, and  the [voter for whom the ballot was intended] will be crossed off the checklist as having  voted.” 

The Montpelier and Barre City Clerks testified respectively that, “We can’t catch [people committing absentee ballot fraud],” and stealing the ballots of non-voters and using them to influence election outcomes “is an opportunity that’s out there.” This is unacceptable, especially in Vermont where local elections are often determined by a handful of votes.

Supporters of the system as-is argue that there is “no evidence” of voter fraud in Vermont, so no security measures are necessary. Of course, this is semantic sleight of hand because in a system where fraud cannot be detected there will never be evidence of fraud no matter to what extent it is occurring. Or they argue the penalties for fraud are high enough to deter anyone from trying. This is again dishonest because if the system makes it impossible to catch someone committing fraud, no penalty is an effective deterrent as there is, in practice, no penalty. 

A national poll done by Rasmussen before the 2024 election indicated that 28% of voters would cheat if they thought it would help their candidate win. This was roughly even across party lines, so this is not a partisan issue. And it only takes one well organized bad apple to impact a state house or senate election in Vermont’s small districts. 

Today two thirds of all ballots cast in Vermont are absentee and that number continues to rise with every election. If we are going to continue with a system that relies on vote by mail, we have to put reasonable security measures in place that allow election officials to independently verify that the votes they are counting were actually cast by the voters they are checking off the list as having voted. A voter ID law such as H.670 requiring a voter to include a driver’s license number, last four digits of one’s social security number, or some similar means for election officials to crosscheck the identity of the person casting the ballot is one common sense tool that will help secure our election system. 

Vermonters deserve an elections system that is convenient, but also secure and accurate.  We have the former, but we do not at present have the latter. Moreover, multiple polls by a wide spectrum of pollsters such show around 80% of people support Voter ID. Passing H.670 should be a no-brainer.