By Guy Page
For the second consecutive election cycle, the Vermont Secretary of State’s reporting software incorrectly tabulated election results reported by city and town election officials.
In both cases, the errors were detected by human oversight comparing the computerized returns with the local returns delivered to the Secretary of State’s office. This year’s mistakes concerned the results of last Tuesday’s statewide primary election.
A similar situation developed in 2022, longtime Secretary of State Jim Condos’ last election. The repetition of the problem is the product of the Secretary of State’s office “limping along” with a “legacy” election software that is scheduled to be completely replaced in 2025, after this year’s election, Bryan Mills, spokesperson for Secretary of State Sarah Copeland-Hanzas, told VDC today.
This is Copeland-Hanzas’ first election cycle. The 2022 problems demonstrate that this week’s problem had nothing to do with the transition to new senior leadership in the Elections Division, Mills said. Longtime election leaders Will Senning and J.P. Isabelle, as well as Deputy Secretary of State Chris Winters, left the office with the Condos administration.
Copeland-Hanzas made clear that the report-generating process is separate and distinct from the official counting of ballots and the local certification of results by town and city clerks.
“I want to assure the public that this delay does not impact the 100% confidence we have in the accuracy of the vote totals submitted by Vermont’s town and city clerks,” Copeland-Hanzas said in a press statement Tuesday, August 20. “The report function did not operate correctly this morning, and our built-in checks caught the issue. My team carefully cross-checks all statewide tallies. We work on a tight timeline but will always prioritize accuracy over expediency to ensure the integrity and confidence of the results that end up being certified.”
The problem came to light Tuesday morning when a scheduled ‘canvassing’ meeting to certify the August 13 primary results was delayed, then postponed until today. GOP Chair Paul Dame, who was present at the meeting, said Copeland-Hanzas made a brief announcement about the decision.
At least part of the problem stems from the software attributing almost all of the write-in votes for two Franklin County incumbent senators to just one of the senators, Sen. Randy Brock of Swanton. In fact, voters cast about the same number of write-ins for both Brock and Sen. Robert Norris. Both incumbents are Republicans.
“I can confirm that we are aware of an issue with write-ins and how they are attributed to candidates in the Franklin County Senate race on our website,” Bryan Mills, spokesperson for Secretary of State Sarah Copeland-Hanzas, told VDC yesterday. “The vote counts are correct. We have verified it with the town clerks and the results have been certified.”
“Within our software system, the report function appears to be creating the error and misrepresenting the vote totals,” Mills said. “We have prioritized being ready for the statewide canvass; however, our team is looking into this issue, and we intend to provide an update to the report on our website related to those write-in campaigns by the end of this week.”