[M]IDDLEBURY – A recount from the tightest contest on general election night is underway in a Middlebury courthouse.
Ballot counters are trying to determine if incumbent Addison County State’s Attorney Dennis Wygmans’ narrow victory over challenger Peter Bevere will stand.
Whoever ends up the winner will have to get to work fast filling three positions in the county prosecutor’s office. Two deputy state’s attorneys have recently resigned to start their own law firm and a part-time victim advocate has also departed for a full-time post in Rhode Island.
Wygmans, a Democrat from South Burlington, topped Bevere, an independent from Middlebury who is currently the chief deputy in the Rutland County State’s Attorney’s Office, by 10 votes according to election-night vote counting three weeks ago.
Wygmans was appointed to the post in 2017 by then-Gov. Peter Shumlin. He was campaigning for the office this year for the first time.
Bevere, also making his first run for the position, requested a recount. That process began on Monday and is expected to continue into Tuesday.
“There’s a lot of decisions that need to be made here, either by myself or Mr. Bevere, that have been on hold through this process,” Wygmans said Monday. “We really need to have a resolution.”
Bevere said he didn’t attend the recount proceedings because he was busy with meetings in Rutland. He said he looks forward to learning the results, hopefully sometime Tuesday.
“They’re going through the process and we’re just waiting to see how it goes,” he said.
Two other recounts in Vermont races are also expected to take place this week to decide contests for a probate judge and a House seat.
In Franklin County, Vaughn Comeau, a Republican, bested Robert Farrar, a Democrat, by 256 votes. That recount is set for Thursday.
Comeau, who runs a private practice that handles probate law, said Monday he could give up that part of the practice if he wins, addressing a criticism raised by Farrar during the campaign.
Also, in two-seat House race from Grand Isle, incumbent Rep. Ben Joseph, a Democrat, petitioned for a recount after finishing fourth out of four candidates.
Fellow incumbent and House Speaker Mitzi Johnson led the four-candidate field with 2,100 votes. The second candidate winning a seat was challenger Leland Morgan, a Republican, with 1,984 votes, followed by his nephew and fellow Republican challenger Michael Morgan, with 1,952 votes, and Joseph, with 1,926 votes.
That recount is set for Wednesday.
By mid-afternoon Monday in Middlebury, ballots from seven of the 23 Addison County communities had been recounted in the state’s attorney contest.
Will Senning, the director of elections for the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office who helped oversee the recount, said he was hopeful final results would be complete by Tuesday.
Wygmans, the incumbent, said that he is anxious to get the results so the office can move forward following the resignations of two deputies and the part-time victim advocate. All three people had let him know prior to the November election that they would be leaving the office, he said.
Christopher Perkett, who has served 15 years as a deputy state’s attorney in the office, said Monday he decided to leave his prosecutor’s job to start a law firm with a fellow deputy state’s attorney in the office, Rebecca Otey.
Otey, who has worked in the office for more than a year, prosecutes domestic assault and sex crime cases in the county in a position funded through a federal grant.
Perkett said Otey is joining him in a law firm they will be opening soon in Bristol called OPLaw.
“I have been considering a move for quite some time, a couple or three years,” he said. “I’m looking for new challenges.”
Perkett added that he didn’t believe the the Legislature was providing enough support to the county state’s attorney offices, and their staff. He said has sensed a “level of disrespect” coming from the Legislature, with some lawmakers believing prosecutors only want to lock people up.
“It’s disappointing that this attitude is so hostile and apparently pervasive,” he said. “When you work as hard as we do to keep people out of the system to be told that all we want to do is to put more people in jail or whatever … it takes a lot of the joy out of the job.”
He said the outcome of the election wouldn’t affect his decision to leave the office and go into private practice.
“It didn’t sway my decision at all,” Perkett said of the election. “I like Dennis, I like Peter. It wasn’t going to change my decision at all.”
Otey, who was out of office Monday, could not be reached for comment.
With Perkett and Otey leaving, the state’s attorney will be the only full-time prosecutor on staff along with one part-time deputy state’s attorney until the other two full-time prosecutorial positions are filled.
Otey leaves the office in December, with Perkett staying on until early January.
