Vermonters are sharing stories of receiving ballots for the dead and gone.

by Rob Roper

During Covid Vermont started mailing absentee ballots to every voter on the statewide checklist (exceptions for those formally challenged) for general elections automatically and without request. The problem with this (well, one of the many problems) – as has been pointed out repeatedly and just as repeatedly ignored by our politicians and election officials – is that there are no mechanisms in place to determine if these ballots, when returned, were actually filled out by the person to whom the vote is being attributed.

And now that ballots are landing in mailboxes across the state for the November 3rd election, Vermonters are sharing stories on social media of receiving ballots for relatives who died years ago, relatives who moved away years ago, previous residents of their dwellings who moved away years ago…. Anyone can scoop these up, fill them out, and send them in with about 100 percent surety that they will not get caught. Is fiasco too strong a word? I don’t think so.

The Election Integrity Network asked Vermonters to share evidence that this is happening by posting eyewitness accounts on their Facebook page. The post now has nearly 500 comments. Only a fraction of those contain specific accounts of misdirected ballots – it’s primarily a lively discussion of the issue — but a lot of them do. Here are some highlights:

My dead wife was getting ballots after she passed in 2015, and yes I reported her death in 2015.

My son got one and he moved out of Vermont 3 years ago. He is registered to vote in his new home town.

I got 2 for my adult children who have moved out of state and changed their voting addresses and one for my ex husband who hasn’t lived with me for 2 years.

Four have been delivered here so far and the folks moved out of state six years ago.

2 years ago we moved to South Carolina. Our former Vermont town mailed us a ballot to our SC address a week ago. ( Not forwarded. Sent directly.) Huh?

Yeah, huh.

My favorite included a video of a young man opening a ballot that was mailed to his father who hasn’t lived in Vermont for over twenty years and is an active voter in New Hampshire. But there’s more. Way more. (Check out the post comments HERE.)

Of course, this conversation inspired the predictable howls of protest from the see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil-of-our-election-security-sieve contingency. But when pressed to name and describe the mechanisms Vermont election officials have at their disposal to detect absentee ballot fraud, let alone trace and prosecute it, these commenters got nuthin’. That is because those things DO NOT EXIST.

Vermont’s absentee ballot program runs entirely on the honor system. No information provided is independently verified by election officials. Any ballot received by election officials is presumed to be valid – and will be processed in the name of whomever it was intended for — as long as all the I’s and T’s on the return envelope are dotted and crossed, regardless of who actual did the dotting and crossing. All supporters of this system can say in its defense is that nobody will cheat because cheating is illegal. Which is, as should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain, absolute lunacy.

To believe that (apart from the notion that if this were the case there would be no crime because all crimes are illegal therefore because they are illegal nobody would commit them) is to believe that electoral politics is always a 100 percent honest game, and that the people who engage in it at every level are always of the highest moral character who would never cheat or do anything underhanded in order to gain power, especially when given what amounts to an open invitation by election law to do so. In a word: HA!

Imagine if we enforced speeding laws the same way we enforce election integrity. Any time an officer pulled over a driver the only basis for issuing a ticket would be on how fast the driver says he was going. No one would ever be caught – and there would be no evidence that any drivers ever exceeded 65 mph on I-89. Ergo, so it would be claimed, the roads are completely safe and secure because nobody has ever been issued a ticket. I’ll use that word again: HA!

But it’s not just the misdirected ballots that are the problem, or even the main problem our absentee ballot system faces – it’s the unwanted ones. Even in a record turnout election year, 30 percent of registered voters don’t vote. In off year elections like this one it’s closer to 45 percent. That’s roughly 150,000 to 225,000 ballots the state is mailing to people who will not use them. But someone else could, either through theft or sale.

A case in Springfield, MA, is being adjudicated now in which the defendant is charged with buying votes for $10 apiece. The only reason this was caught is because it happened at a polling place – not absentee – and the vote sellers were dumb enough to ask election officials where to go to get their $10. With Vermont’s all vote by mail, these transactions can all take place far away from any official oversight. It’s insane.

But — and I get this is heavy irony — if you want to change this system in the future, you’ve got to elect people to office who are willing to change it and do so within the system we’ve got now. Republicans showed in 2024 that they can win a record number of races within this system as it is. So, yes, vote, vote, vote! (That repetition is just a literary representation of enthusiasm for doing your civic duty, not a call to vote multiple times, no matter how much our system encourages it.) Go vote!