Pushes left-wing narrative despite evidence.
by Rob Roper
Last week WCAX’s Calvin Cutler interviewed me for a story he was doing about state senate Democrats putting in a bill to enshrine the federal Voting Rights Act into state law as a hedge against the Trump Administration’s desire to restrict mail-in voting and to ensure only citizens are allowed to vote in our elections. I appreciate Cutler’s reaching out to me, but I am left with a bone or two to pick with his editorial decisions.
Here’s how WCAX distilled my fifteen-minute interview with the reporter:
The president says it’s aimed at curbing mail-in voting and what he describes as fraud.
Some in Vermont have similar concerns about the current system.
“A handful of votes can swing a state house or senate election,” said Rob Roper.
Rob Roper, a conservative columnist, has concerns about Vermont’s universal mail-in ballot system and the potential for ballots to be filled out by others. He says the system could be tightened up with a voter ID law.
“We have a system in Vermont now where it is impossible to detect absentee ballot fraud because we do not have tools in place for election officials to detect it,” Roper said.
But top election officials stress current election systems are safe, have boosted turnout, and have only resulted in a handful of alleged fraud cases.
Yeah. That’s the gist of my take on the situation, and I get that for a two minute and fifty second news story a lot of any conversation has to be left on the cutting room floor, but here’s my beef: I didn’t just say (“Roper said”) Vermont’s absentee ballot system is not secure because there are no tools in place to detect fraud when it occurs, I brought Cutler the receipts.
Back in 2021, when the legislature was debating the bill that would make the Covid emergency measures of mailing live ballots out to everybody on the voter checklist without request, top elections officials testified before both the House and Senate Government Operations committees that our absentee ballot system in Vermont is, in fact, NOT secure.
Then Director of Elections, Will Senning, admitted that if someone got a hold of someone else’s absentee ballot, or multiple someone else’s ballots, filled them out, signed the name of the voter to whom the ballot was sent, and submitted it, those fraudulently submitted ballots – his words here – “will be processed, and [the voters for whom the ballots were intended], will be checked off as having voted.” That’s not secure.
Moreover, the City Clerks from Barre and Montpelier testified respectively that stealing unwanted or unclaimed ballots for purposes of influencing the outcome of elections is “an opportunity that’s out there,” (GREAT!), and if bad actors engage in this kind of absentee ballot fraud, “we can’t necessarily stop them.” Again, this is not a system that is secure from fraud. Not at all.
I shared video of this testimony (see above) with Cutler and talked him through it, yet he and his editors chose not to present this evidence to their viewers. Worse, they decided to give the last word to people who are clearly misleading the public: “But top election officials stress current election systems are safe, have boosted turnout, and have only resulted in a handful of alleged fraud cases.”
False! Maybe. And they have no idea how much fraud is or isn’t taking place.
Based on the evidence I showed him, Cutler knows full well that when top election officials tell the public our current elections systems are safe, THEY ARE LYING because we can see that they tell a different story when pressed in official testimony. I know I’m only a citizen journalist and Cutler is the supposed real deal, but from my humble perspective this is the real news scoop here: uncovering a betrayal of public trust, or at least calling out and questioning the inconsistency. But instead, he chose to participate in the cover up.
Also based on the evidence I showed him Culter knows that that the claim that the system has only resulted in a handful of alleged fraud cases is a manipulation of the truth to perpetuate a lie (see Bill Clinton’s “it depends what your definition of “is” is as an example.) While it’s true there are very few legally pursued “cases” regarding absentee ballot fraud in Vermont, election officials – as we have seen from their own testimony – have no clue if and when absentee ballot fraud is occurring. They can’t detect it. They can’t catch people who commit it. So, they can’t truthfully say they know for certain it isn’t happening.
A system that can’t detect fraud will never produce evidence of fraud. Their argument for why we don’t need a common sense voter ID law is like saying we don’t need a radon detector in our house because radon has never been detected in the house, so it must be perfectly safe. Breathe deep! Yes, it’s absurd. And the reporter knows it and chose to give credence to rather than challenge this absurd proposition.
And my last issue with the piece is that, while it is news that this bill is being put forward by senate Democrats, it wouldn’t have taken too much effort to mention that there is a Republican bill in the House, H.670, that would put a voter ID requirement into Vermont election law – something that multiple polls indicate around 80 percent of the public favors. Maybe WCAX do a story about that? But in the event they don’t, call your Representatives and Senators and tell them to support the Voter ID bill.
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.