In recent weeks, the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office sent out absentee ballots to 438,000 active registered voters so that state residents have the option to vote by mail this November.
But thousands of those ballots have returned to town and city clerks offices around the state undeliverable, without reaching voters.
Clerks and state officials say this is because residents may have recently moved, or didn’t provide officials with precise or accurate address information. And they stress that people who haven’t received mailable ballots can still get in touch with local officials and request them.
Amy Bovee, Burlington’s assistant city clerk, estimates that more than 1,000 absentee ballots have been returned to her office as undeliverable. There are about 26,000 active registered voters in Burlington.
Bovee said that some residents haven’t received ballots because they’ve recently moved to another location in the city without updating their address with local officials.
In other cases, the ballots haven’t arrived because residents didn’t provide exact apartment numbers when they registered to vote.
The city has been encouraging residents who haven’t received ballots to reach out so that officials can issue them another ballot.
“In a lot of cases people moved right after the ballots were sent out, or maybe they were missing an apartment number or something like that. So very often it’s something small that we can correct, and send them another one,” Bovee said.
Bovee said that overall the rollout of the expanded vote-by-mail system has been successful. She pointed out that 1,000 city residents have already submitted their ballots, which will help reduce poll traffic on Election Day.
“I think all things considered, considering how quickly this got pulled together I think it’s really going fairly well. Of course there have been some small bumps along the road, but the state’s been working through those issues with us,” Bovee said.
Stacy Jewell, the town clerk in St. Johnsbury, said the municipality has about 4,400 active registered voters, and that 200-300 absentee ballots have been returned as undeliverable.
She estimated that 70% of the ballots that have been returned to the town were sent to addresses of apartment buildings that lacked a specific unit number.
“So if they didn’t put an apartment number in there, the post office would not deliver them,” Jewell said.
Others belong to voters who have moved out of town or out of state.
She says that the town has been able to locate accurate addresses for some voters in town and remailed some of the ballots by looking at local tax and utility billing information.
And like other clerks, Jewell is telling voters to call the town if they haven’t received a ballot, so that it can mail it to a proper address. Voters can also pick up their ballots at the clerk’s office, she said.
Jewell said that overall, the rollout of the expanded mail-in ballot system has gone well.
“I don’t find any horrific problems,” Jewell said. She added that while the issue with apartment residents has been “kind of painful,” it’s not “the end of the world.”
“People can still request their ballots, they can still vote in person,” Jewell said.
On Monday she said that about 1,000 ballots in St. Johnsbury had already been filled out and returned.
Last week, the Caledonia Record reported that 800 ballots in Newport had been returned to city officials as undelivered, while 400 had been completed and submitted by city voters.
State officials moved to expand the state’s mail-in voting system earlier this year after the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
The state has already surpassed its record for the highest number of absentee ballots cast in a general election. Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos said that as of Wednesday afternoon, 110,000 Vermonters had already returned ballots to town clerks.
The previous record was set in 2016, when about 95,000 Vermonters voted using absentee ballots.
Condos said that the undeliverable ballots had been anticipated this fall, given the expansion of the state’s vote-by-mail system. He pointed out that if someone moves out of a given town, but is still registered to vote at a previous address, the person cannot vote using their old town’s ballot.
That’s part of the reason why the ballots are being returned to town clerks instead of being forwarded automatically to new addresses.
“If you live in Montpelier, and you move to Berlin, you should be getting a different ballot,” Condos said.
“So we didn’t want a ballot from Montpelier to be forwarded to someone who’s now living in Berlin. So this was expected, and it was by design,” he said.
Condos said that anecdotally, the two most common reasons ballots are being returned to town and city clerks are if residents have moved or if there is “something wrong” with the address listed in their town’s voter checklist.
The secretary of state also stressed that Vermonters who haven’t received ballots should contact their town clerks.
“No one’s going to be denied if they’re an eligible voter,” Condos said.
Hilary Francis, the clerk in Brattleboro, said the town has about 9,800 registered voters, and that ballots for about 400 of them have been returned as undeliverable.
She said that some of those ballots were returned to her office with forwarding addresses for another residency in town while others have forwarding addresses for residencies out of state. Some ballots came back without forwarding addresses at all.
“It may be that they moved out of town and just never told us, and so we didn’t know. Or they moved addresses within town and just hadn’t gotten to update their records yet,” Francis said.
She said as the state expands its vote-by-mail system, there will be some voters who have to reach out to her office to receive a mailable ballot.
“Some people aren’t going to get their ballots right away, call us. If you got a ballot for somebody who no longer lives at your house, call us,” Francis said.
“All of those things are just proof of an imperfect system, they’re not proof of voter fraud,” she added.
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the uptick in voting by mail expected this November will lead to fraud.
Elections officials around the nation, including Condos, have criticized Trump for these comments.
Curry Galloway, the city clerk in St. Albans, said her office has received a “good amount” of ballots that couldn’t be delivered, but fewer than she had expected. She didn’t have an estimated number.
But Galloway said that voting has gone “pretty smoothly” so far, noting that the state already had given residents the option to vote by mail for years.
“We’ve had absentee voting for a long time so it’s not too far removed from what we normally do on a regular basis,” she said.
