Progressive candidate for lieutenant governor Dean Corren has won the right to have his name on the Democratic ticket in the November general election.
Corren, who will also appear under the Progressive label, actively campaigned as a write-in candidate for the Democratic nomination in last week’s primary.
That effort paid off. According to Secretary of State Jim Condos, Corren received 3,874 Democratic write-in votes, 60 percent of the write-ins cast. Republican Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, who did not campaign for the Democratic nod, got half that many votes (1,895) without really trying (30 percent).
Tuesday’s release of the primary election write-in tallies confirmed predictions of a low voter turnout. Without a major statewide primary contest, only 39,424 voters cast ballots last Tuesday. That’s 9 percent of the state’s 440,194 registered voters. Condos called that “pretty low.”
Turnout was higher in places where there were contests of local interest — in Essex (19 percent), Grand Isle (23 percent) and Orleans (13 percent) counties, where there were state’s attorney races, and in Windham County (13 percent), where there was a four-way Democratic battle for two state senate seats.
Libertarian candidate for governor Dan Feliciano mounted a well-publicized write-in effort to gain the Republican nod over the party-supported Scott Milne. Feliciano garnered 2,093 write-ins in the Republican primary; Milne, who was on the ballot against two other GOP contestants, collected 11,486 votes.
Milne will represent the GOP in the Nov. 4 general election against incumbent Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin. Feliciano will appear on the ballot as a Libertarian and will be joined by Liberty Union candidate Pete Diamondstone and independents Emily Peyton, Cris Ericson and Bernard Peters.
Turnout in Chittenden County was 7 percent. It was highest in Grand Isle County, where 23 percent of voters voted.
Condos’ office said it did not count write-in ballots in races where the combined total was not more than 250, the minimum to qualify for write-in statewide.
State Treasurer Beth Pearce, a Democrat, also won the Republican nomination with 752 votes. Auditor Doug Hoffer, a Progressive, also won Democratic and Republican nominations, as did Condos.
The results also confirmed that Mark Donka won the Republican primary to challenge Democratic incumbent U.S. Rep. Peter Welch.
Condos thanked his five-member elections team, whom he said worked over the holiday weekend to tabulate the votes.
He said the state’s election reporting system, which is not new but became mandatory this year for the first time, worked well. In the primary last week, 244 out of 275 precincts statewide used the system, Condos said. The Legislature did not establish a penalty for communities that do not comply with the mandate.
