by Stu Lindberg

In a recent radio interview, our Secretary of State, Sara Copland Hanzas, painted a dishonestly rosy picture of Vermont’s current elections system. She responded to the host’s question about potential “ballot stuffing” by saying, “We have very detailed election procedures that our town and city clerks follow to a tee, which means that whether they’re pulling in the ballots that came in today’s mail or they are working on election day as people are coming and casting their ballot in person, there are multiple eyes on every step of the process. To imagine there is some widespread fraud going on would have to include nearly everyone.”

This is just not true. I don’t think most Vermonters realize how drastically Vermont’s election system was changed through a law passed by the Vermont’s legislature in May of 2021. A law that Copeland Hanzas, then a Representative and chair of the House Government Operations Committee, was largely responsible for.

While Vermont’s previous election laws required strict ballot chain of custody, Copeland Hanzas’ 2021 law, with its emphasis on mailed ballots, eliminated that critical feature. As a result, today we can no longer know with any degree of surety who actually voted the majority of the returned ballots in an election.

When Copeland Hanzas says, “there are multiple eyes on every step of the process,” she is not telling the truth. There are no official eyes on the process at any time after the ballots are mailed out to the time they are returned to the Clerk. Nobody sees who the ballot is delivered to, or if it is delivered at all. When ballots are returned by mail, nobody witnesses who fills out the ballot, the voter it’s attributed to on the checklist or someone else. Nor can we know if the ballot is filled out in privacy or is improperly influenced by, for example, an abusive spouse or manipulative caregiver or a campaign worker paying bribe. In cases where ballots are mailed in or left in drop boxes, nobody has eyes on who is returning completed ballots for whom or if they’re “stuffing” the mailbox. The reality is our elections are, for the most part, completely unsupervised at least for every critical step of the process, and therefore their true accuracy is unverifiable and unknowable. 

When Copeland Hanzas claims, “To imagine there is some widespread fraud going on would have to include nearly everyone,” this is again not true. While I am not claiming here that widespread fraud is happening (it may or may not be, we can’t know for sure), it is very possible for mail in ballot fraud to take place at any scale completely beyond the oversight of any election officials. No election official needs to be “in on it” because our current election system leaves them almost entirely out of it. From the time ballots are mailed out by the state to the time are returned to the Clerk’s office, no local election official has any idea what happens to them, legal or otherwise. 

Nor, when the ballots are returned by mail or drop box, do election officials have any tools available to verify that the voter information included with the ballot is accurate. Vermont has no ID requirements, no signature verification procedure, or anything that would allow an election official to determine if a ballot had been fraudulently filled out. 

If I got your ballot in the mail accidentally or through other underhanded means, filled it out, signed your name which I would know from the envelope it was mailed in, and sent it in, no election official in Vermont would or could question the validity of that vote. Even if you showed up on election day, were told you already voted by mail, and you contested that, while you might be allowed to vote again (or for the first time), the original fraudulent vote would probably still be counted because we allow vote counting to begin thirty days before election day, and there is no way to retrieve the vote once counted. So, even though you cast a ballot, your legitimate vote would be canceled out by the fraudulent one, as if you never voted at all. It’s ridiculous! 

Copeland Hanzas tells us that “there are multiple eyes on every step of the process” because that is what a secure, fair and accurate election system requires. It’s what voters want to hear. It’s what we deserve, but we don’t have that now. We need to get back to a system where there are, in practice, multiple eyes on every step of the process from registering a voter to casting a ballot to counting the votes. But to achieve this we will need to pass new election laws that meet this standard. I hope our lawmakers will do this in 2026.