The U.S. Supreme Court corrected a false statement about Vermont’s voting rules in a written opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, after Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos wrote justices a letter on Wednesday requesting a change.
But Condos said Thursday the correction doesn’t go far enough.
Kavanaugh’s opinion originally stated that Vermont was one of the states that decided not to change its election proceedings in the wake of the pandemic, compared to states whose legislatures pushed back the deadline for mailing in absentee ballots.
“Other states such as Vermont, by contrast, have decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules, including to the Election Day deadline for receipt of absentee ballots,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Kavanaugh’s claim was inaccurate because Vermont has made changes to its election rules this year. Most notably, the Vermont Legislature moved in June to authorize Condos to automatically send an absentee ballot to all registered voters in the state ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.
The opinion was attached to the court’s decision this week to U.S. Supreme Court to quash a court order in Wisconsin that would have allowed state officials to count mail-in ballots that arrived up to six days after Election Day.
After Condos sent the Supreme Court a letter requesting a correction, it changed the opinion on Wednesday, inserting “deadline” into “ordinary election rules.”
Now the opinion reads: “Other States such as Vermont, by contrast, have decided not to make changes to their ordinary election-deadline rules, including to the election-day deadline for receipt of absentee ballots.”
Responding to the correction, Condos said that a “one-word addition doesn’t go far enough.”
In a statement, Condos said he will not “sit idly by while Justice Kavanaugh uses factually incorrect information about the Green Mountain State as cover to erode voting rights in the middle of a pandemic-distressed election.”
“The opinion still misrepresents the significant changes we made here in Vermont to ensure every vote counts in the middle of a global pandemic, so that no voter has to choose between their health and their right to vote,” Condos said.
The secretary of state, who is headed for his fifth re-election in November, added that Vermont officials have made myriad changes to election laws, including the decision to send all voters a mail-in ballot, allow clerks to start counting ballots 30 days ahead of the election, and enable curbside and outdoor voting.
“That is why we did not move our election day deadline for the return of ballots,” he said.
