Republican Gov. Phil Scott said his administration will consider whether to support changing election laws to permanently allow mail-in ballots in future elections.
An emergency Covid-19 election provision gave the Secretary of State’s office the authority to mail about 500,000 ballots directly to all active Vermont voters in the 2020 election during the pandemic. A record 372,000 ballots were cast by Vermonters in 2020; the previous record was 326,822 for the 2008 presidential election.
Scott sidestepped a question Friday from reporters about whether he thinks Vermont should implement a permanent universal mail-in voting system for future elections. That was an “interesting question” to consider, he said.
“We’ll be able to reflect on that after the elections are all certified and so forth,” Scott said.
But Scott said he would like to see ballots mailed to Vermonters for Town Meeting Day — as he expects Covid-19 will still be an issue for many months.
“We’ve had very low voter turnout for Town Meeting and this may be a way to bolster that. If we had this much participation in this general election, possibly this could work for Town Meeting Day,” Scott said.
After the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a bill mandating that the governor and secretary of state agree on emergency pandemic election protocol, Scott and Secretary of State Jim Condos failed to see eye to eye on the issue for many weeks.
During the spring and summer, Scott had been reluctant to sign off on Condos’ plan to move forward with expanding mail-in voting for the general election.
At the time, the Republican had wanted an independent committee to decide after the August primary whether the universal vote by mail expansion was necessary.
Condos has repeatedly said that waiting until after the primary would have made it difficult for his staff to implement a vote-by-mail-system.
The Legislature finally passed a second piece of legislation removing the governor from the equation and gave Condos authority to go ahead with his plans.
“We’ll reflect on what happened in this general and if we can move forward and try it on Town Meeting Day,” Scott said Friday.
“That will tell us a lot as to whether we can pursue this further, but so far, so good,” he said.
