Montpelier City Clerk John Odum is running for Vermont secretary of state as a Democrat.
After a decade overseeing elections at the local level, Odum, 54, said he’d like to scale up his grassroots experience statewide. A former IT specialist for campaigns who is also a certified ethical hacker, Odum said he brings a uniquely informed perspective to the conversation around election security.
“I’m not pretending I’m going to be the IT guy, but it’s something I can be more directly involved in — I think in a way that no secretary of state has ever been,” he said.
In particular, Odum said the state should explore moving away from “opaque corporate vendors” to handle election security and instead move to open-source software. Open-source code is freely available for redistribution and modification, and Odum said getting Vermont’s open-source community involved in creating new options might produce cheaper and more secure solutions.
“This is a different paradigm that we need to move towards,” he said. “And I think we are uniquely suited in Vermont, to start looking into testing those waters and see if it’s a good fit.”
Odum has been a vocal advocate for several progressive election reforms, including Vermont’s same-day voter registration law. He also helped lead the charge at the local level to push for non-citizen voting. In 2018, Montpelier became the first municipality in the state to approve a charter change allowing its non-citizen residents to vote on local matters.
Municipalities in Vermont cannot amend their charters without lawmakers signing off, and legislators finally did so last year, although Gov. Phil Scott then vetoed the measure. Lawmakers in turn narrowly overrode the Republican’s veto, and non-citizen residents cast their ballots for the first time in Montpelier and Winooski on Town Meeting Day earlier this month.
Odum noted with some measure of pride that he was even being sued by both the state and national GOP for his role in the non-citizen voting initiative. He said that, as secretary of state, he would not back down from supporting similar efforts.
“The Secretary of State’s Office doesn’t need to sit on the sidelines,” he said. “I think we could get actively involved in being a resource for communities that want to go this route or who want to expand the franchise in other ways.”
Odum is also a well-known Vermont commentator. He founded and, for many years, ran the popular left-leaning Green Mountain Daily politics blog, and he has been published by The Guardian and Huffington Post.
He is the second person to formally declare his candidacy to replace outgoing Secretary of State Jim Condos, who announced in February he would not run for re-election in 2022 after more than a decade in office. Chris Winters, Condos’ current deputy, announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for the post only days later.
But there are others who still could join. State Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, D-Bradford, who helms the House Government Operations Committee — a legislative panel with jurisdiction over elections, open meeting laws and re-apportionment — has also said she is interested in the post. And on the other side of the aisle, former Scott aide and current Deputy Labor Commissioner Dustin Degree has said he is mulling a run.
