It’s official: The results of Vermont’s Aug. 9 primary election are now signed, sealed and delivered.
After technical glitches delayed the process, originally scheduled for Aug. 16, representatives from all three of the state’s major parties met at the Secretary of State’s Office in Montpelier on Monday afternoon to certify the results of Vermont’s statewide and federal races.
Vermont GOP Chair Paul Dame, Progressive Party Chair Sen. Anthony Pollina, P/D-Washington, and Vermont Democratic Party Executive Director Jim Dandeneau met with Vermont’s election officials at the State Street office for the legally binding yet largely ceremonial affair.
“That’s it?” Secretary of State Jim Condos asked with a grin after the three men had spent some 15 minutes passing certificates around a table and signing on the dotted lines.
“That’s it,” replied Will Senning, who leads the Secretary of State’s Office’s elections division.
The certified tally confirms preliminary reports of strong voter turnout. With 133,578 votes cast, this election had the second-highest primary voter turnout in state history. About 38% of voters, or 51,243, took advantage of early or absentee voting options. And voters overwhelmingly chose to complete Democratic ballots, with 102,408 cast compared to 30,560 for Republicans. Progressive ballots numbered 610.
Senning and his colleagues worked around the clock for the last two weeks to sort out a software malfunction that bedeviled the usually speedy certification of Vermont’s elections.
By law, certification usually takes place a week after the election. But new legislative maps drawn as a result of the redistricting states must undergo every 10 years split certain municipalities in ways that confused the state’s election software, according to officials.
The issue was not counting and tallying up the votes, state officials have stressed, but producing the canvass reports needed to certify the results with the correct information.
“I assure the public that this administrative delay has not impacted the 100% confidence that we have in the accuracy of the candidate vote totals reported by the city and town clerks,” Condos said in brief remarks Monday — a point he has taken pains to repeatedly make.
Condos also plugged Vermont’s #1 ranking in MIT’s election performance index, as well as the success of the state’s new ballot “curing” law, which allowed the majority of defective ballots cast in this election to be fixed in time to be counted.
Results for local races are certified by county canvassing committees. That process, too, was delayed by the same software glitch, but also wrapped up Monday. Senning said Rutland and Windham counties were scheduled to finish certifying their results by the end of the day.
