Our elections system is currently designed to maximize cheating.

by Rob Roper

In order to ensure anything we decide as a society by voting – elections, referendums, budgets, etcetera – is a fair and accurate reflection of the voting public, the system has to be able to safeguard the principles of one person/one vote and the secret ballot. If the system doesn’t do that, the public will never have confidence that the outcomes of elections are valid or the office holders and policies decided by ballot are legitimate (the ones where they are on the losing side, anyway). If this dynamic is allowed to persist, then the fabric of our society shreds – as we are too often witnessing today.

For a free society to function properly, our voting system needs to make it easy for eligible voters to vote, and difficult for anyone to cheat. It’s a balance, and right now Vermont’s system is way out of balance – favoring the cheaters.

Our problems arose with Covid and the decision to switch from primarily a “vote in person at a polling place” system (if you wanted an absentee ballot you had to request one) to a “vote by mail” system where live ballots are mailed out to everyone on the voter checklist regardless of request. The problem is this new absentee-ballots-for-all system provides virtually no safeguards to prevent absentee ballot fraud.

The old system ensured one-person-one vote and the secret ballot like this: when the voter showed up at the polls, an election official looked them in the eye and verified who they were, handed the voter a ballot, watched the voter go into the booth and fill out that ballot in secret, watched the voter deposit that ballot in the box, and then marked the voter off the checklist as having cast his or her one vote. It was a secure chain of custody that ensured a secret ballot and nobody voted more than once. It worked.

The new vote-by-mail system, however, removed the entire voting process out from under any supervision by local election officials. Nor are their tools in place – such as voter ID – for election officials to verify voter legitimacy and ballot integrity after the fact.

Ballots in Vermont today for general elections are mailed out by the state, not local election officials, thousands of them delivered to the wrong or outdated addresses, and between one and two hundred thousand to people who will not use the ballots themselves because they choose not to vote. Ballots are filled out under circumstances unknowable to election officials. Is one spouse filling out the other’s ballot without consent? Is a boss or a landlord telling how and observing how an employee or tenant should vote? Are multiple misdirected or unwanted ballots being stolen by or sold to organized fraudsters? Election officials in our new system have no idea. And then those ballots are submitted to the polling place anonymously via the US Postal Service or an unsupervised drop box without an election official ever having laid eyes on either the ballot for the voter.

This is insane. It is 100 percent insecure. There is no way in this system for election officials to ensure one-person-one vote or that the secret ballot was respected. None at all. A person (persons, campaign or organization) hell bent on committing voter fraud could not have devised a better system for getting away with their crimes if they tried.

(I have written often about how easy it is to cheat in Vermont elections and impossible to get caught, and the testimony of Clerks and the Director of Elections confirming this reality, so, for the sake of space won’t repeat that here, but if you missed it or want a refresher: Article, Video, Video, Video).

This is why we now more than ever need some form of ID verification for voting in Vermont. If voters are no longer required to present themselves in person to election officials to be recognized as who they are, election officials need some other way to cross check and confirm that the ballot they are processing was actually filled out and submitted by the person who is being marked off the checklist as having voted. Because, remember, every ballot cast illegitimately disenfranchises a legitimate voter by cancelling out your vote. This is every bit as effective as if someone prevented you from voting by locking you in a basement until the polls closed. Only with absentee ballot fraud, you never know you’ve been disenfranchised.

A voter ID requirement is just common sense good policy. In fact, a recent story on CNN noted that Pew polling shows that 83 percent of Americans support mandatory voter ID laws, including similarly large majorities of Democrats and racial minority groups, and this support has only been growing since 2018. It’s not just Pew. Gallup shows 84 percent support; Rasmussen shows 87 percent. Another poll taken just before the 2024 election showed 28 percent of voters said they’d cheat in order to help their candidate win. So, do that math!

There are two election bills in the State House worth paying attention to on this subject. H.670 is a straightforward bill requiring Vermonters to present a photo ID in order to vote. It hangs on the wall of House Government Operations where the chair, Matt Biriong (D-Vergennes) refuses to give it so much as an introductory hearing. The other is S.298, an elections reform bill that is being actively discussed in Senate Government Operations. It does not contain a voter ID provision but properly amended it could! And should!

Click HERE ad HERE for each committee’s contact information and let the legislators know you support voter ID for Vermont.

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.