[O]ne in six people who vote in the upcoming gubernatorial primary will file their ballots early, according to election officials.
The Secretary of State’s Office expects that around 17 percent of Vermonters who participate in the Aug. 9 primary will have either voted at their town clerk’s office or through the mail.
That’s about half of the 31 percent of people who voted early in the 2008 presidential campaign that elected Barack Obama, when political experts say his campaign convinced young, African-American, and first-time voters to submit ballots early in swing states to ensure his election.
The trend has picked up steam over the years, and has become more popular with senior citizens, low-income people, and people with inflexible schedules, according to the New York Times. In 2012, Obama became the first sitting president to cast an early ballot.
In Vermont, voters can ask their town clerks to mail a ballot to them, or they can walk into their local town hall, ask for an absentee ballot, and fill it out right there on the spot. Since 2010, according to data from the Secretary of State’s Office, between 15 percent and 17 percent of primary voters have chosen that option.
Local campaigns aren’t saying much about their approach to early voting, and it is unclear which candidates will benefit the most.
Democrat Matt Dunne’s campaign may have been the first to embrace early voting. On June 24, the campaign sent out an email blast announcing “a huge early voting push to increase voter turnout” through the primary.
Brittney Wilson, the campaign manager for Republican Phil Scott, said in an interview Friday that the campaign is also encouraging early voting, but she declined to disclose any specific campaign strategies.
Ian Moskowitz, campaign manager for Democrat Peter Galbraith, said via email: “All of our canvassers and phone bankers are encouraging early voting and we’ve pushed it to our e-mail list and on social media.”
Spokespeople for Republican Bruce Lisman and Democrat Sue Minter did not respond to inquiries for comment before press time.
Will Senning, the director of elections at the Secretary of State’s Office, says overall voter turnout and the number of early ballots submitted this year will be close to numbers from 2010 — when Democrats had a fierce, five-way primary to replace Gov. Jim Douglas.
That year, when Gov. Peter Shumlin was elected, 18,210 people voted absentee in the gubernatorial primary—or about 17.3 percent of the people who voted. That’s the highest percentage of early voter turnout in the past six years.
As of Friday, 14,868 people had requested early voting ballots, and 7,136 of those voters have already turned the ballots in. That trails the 2010 numbers but is more than the 6,034 submitted in 2014, and it appears the total will likely run higher than the 9,272 submitted in 2012.
The vast majority of ballots already submitted for Aug. 9 were requested in-state, and fewer than 900 of the people who requested ballots were voting from out-of-state or abroad, according to a VTDigger analysis of data from the Secretary of State’s office.
The towns that have submitted the most absentee ballots as of Friday are Burlington, Barre, South Burlington, Montpelier, and Shelburne, in that order. It is not clear how many of those absentee ballots were coordinated by gubernatorial campaigns.
“Campaigns love early voting because if they can get you out early then they don’t have to go back to you,” said Rich Clark, the director of the Castleton Polling Institute. “That’s less canvassing that they have to do, less phone calls leading up to Election Day.”
He said there’s no way of knowing who those early voters cast their ballots for, and whether those people would have voted on Election Day if they had not used the absentee ballots.
