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By Rob Roper

Back in the end of March, I took part in a panel discussion on election integrity that included Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas. At that event, she said unequivocally and I quote: “Most definitively, no. We do not have people who are registered to vote in this state who are non-citizens.” Most definitively, no. Remember that.

This has been the standard BS line every time someone raises an issue with the (flagrantly obvious) vulnerabilities in Vermont’s election systems: a canned response that we have the cleanest most perfectest processes ever! And anyone who says different is a knuckle dragging “election denier” or some equally dismissive, often more profane, pejorative.

Fast forward to last week, August 28^th to be exact. At a press conference announcing that roughly 900 people had been removed from the statewide checklist because they (along with 19,000 others who were not removed) had been improperly registered to vote through the DMV, Copeland Hanzas said this in response to a question about whether or not any of the removed “voters” were ineligible non-citizens:

The Department of Motor Vehicles is in the business of issuing driver credentials, not in the business of determining the eligibility to vote. [And because it’s nobody in this system’s job to verify voter eligibility] it is reasonable to expect there may be a few people on that administrative removal list who were not eligible to vote because they were not citizens.

Loads to unpack there! Let’s start with the big one: “It’s reasonable to expect” non-citizens were improperly registered to vote under our supposedly oh-so secure elections system is a far cry from, “Most definitively, no. We do not have people who are registered to vote in this state who are non-citizens.” So, there you have it! Reporters, politicians, activists – all of you parroting the party line for all these years about clean, pristine voter rolls, you’ve been peddling a falsehood. Not only “without evidence,” as the popular phrasing goes, but with evidence to the contrary.

And Copeland Hanzas knew she was lying when she made this “definitively, no,” claim in March, because by her own admission these potential problems were brought to her attention last December. Which is also an untruth because many people – like me! – have been raising this sirens-blaring, arms waiving, red flag for literally years.

The second half of Copeland Hanzas’ quote really underscores the absurdity in our elections system: The DMV, she says, “is not in the business of determining the eligibility to vote.” Okaaaay…. So, the entity that you made responsible for registering the overwhelming majority of Vermonters to vote DOES NOTHING — and is not expected to do anything — to verify their eligibility to vote. Do you, dear reader, perhaps see the glaring lack of security this causes in this supposedly secure system?

Asked by a reporter if the Secretary’s office probed the question of the number of non-citizens or otherwise ineligible voters who were part of this very minor purge, Copeland Hanzas explained:

No. I mean, that was not a question that we could ask because we don’t have a complete data set. And that’s been one of the challenges all along. We are asking the Department of Motor Vehicles if they can attest to something that is not in their requirements and is not in their business process, so that’s not a question that we could answer. [Emphasis added]

Let me translate that for you: We have no idea how many ineligible voters we’re signing up to vote in our elections because nobody is policing eligibility the first place, and there’s no way to go back and detect these occurrences after the fact because we don’t collect the data. It is “not a question we could answer.” Yet answer it they have for years with the lie that our voter rolls are unquestionably clean.

Her explanations get worse.

Each person who goes through the process of filling out their driver’s license form and opting to register to vote is asked to attest to that question, are you a resident of Vermont, are you 18, are you a citizen. That attestation is similar to the paper voter registration form one might pick up at their town clerk’s office, and similar to the questions asked when someone goes to register online through our website.

Let me translate THAT for you: This problem of no official verification of voter eligibility isn’t just a DMV problem, it’s an everywhere problem. No one at your town clerk’s office or on-line is checking to make sure someone who says their eligible to vote is actually eligible to vote. Ours is the equivalent of a system for issuing speeding tickets based solely on how fast the driver says he or she was going at the time of being pulled over. “Not a tick over 65 miles an hour fer sure, officer. Scout’s honor!”

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, because this revelation about the 900 out of 20,000 improperly registered voters purged only considered voters who actively opted out of the DMV’s voter registration process but were added to the rolls anyway. It doesn’t consider how many people improperly left the opt-out box blank and were therefore illegitimately registered to vote, either through innocent oversite or conscious malfeasance.

What is that number? Again, most disturbingly, it is “not a question that we could ask” and “not a question that we could answer” because our oh-so safe and secure elections system doesn’t allow for answers — or even inquiries — into those questions. And that’s not a bug, fellow citizens, it’s a feature, because Copeland Hanzas has no intention whatsoever of fixing these problems. The message behind this press conference was, “Just move along. Nothing more to see here, folks!”

Share Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 25 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.