If we can put a person on the moon and bring them back in one piece, can we electronically send a ballot to a Vermont voter in a different country and maintain confidence in our election system?
That’s the question that Bryan Finney, CEO of Democracy Live, rhetorically asked lawmakers in the Senate Government Operations Committee on Wednesday.
But the question isn’t rhetorical for a number of concerned groups and citizens, and it’s at the heart of a big debate about a small section of a bill, H.429, that covers a number of miscellaneous changes to the state’s election law.
Vermont currently delivers some electronic ballots through the Secretary of State’s “My Voter” webpage to, say, military personnel. But, as it stands, the law requires that all ballots be returned via snail mail or in person.
That system, most stakeholders agree, has prevented some people from voting.
“If you’re deployed on a submarine, or in a foxhole on the frontlines, or in Antarctica,” that makes it tough to access a printer, an envelope or mail service, said Will Senning, elections division director for the Secretary of State’s Office.
“Every election, I have at least a handful of voters who I talk to who don’t have the time or ability to get their ballot back to us by mail,” he said. “And they’re pretty much straight up being disenfranchised at that point.”
To that end, Senning said he and former Secretary of State Jim Condos had long been crafting a solution. This year, the Secretary of State’s Office worked with lawmakers to try to see it through. The legislation, which passed the House, is under discussion in the Senate.
Enter Democracy Live: a company that specializes in remote voting techniques. According to Finney’s presentation to lawmakers on Wednesday, the United Nations presented the company with an “accessibility in voting” award. It’s also recently been investigated by the online publication CyberScoop for allegedly funding and guiding research to debunk concerns about the security of its system.
The proposal would allow voters who are ill, injured, disabled, members of the military or Vermonters living overseas to return their ballots through an online cloud that, according to the company that controls it, is more thoroughly reviewed and assessed than any other election technology.
Town clerks would download the completed ballot from the cloud, print it out, and process it the same way all other ballots are processed. Supporters of the measure point to other states’ methods of electronically returning completed ballots — through email or fax, for example — and say this method would be much more secure.
“The really important thing is that an electronic ballot returned from one voter through the town clerk, to the town clerk, is not online voting,” said Rep. Mike McCarthy, D-St. Albans City, who has worked on the bill. “The counting of the ballots is still all paper, not connected to the internet.”
Therein lies the rub: Opponents of the bill say that the proposal does, in fact, count as online voting, and it therefore raises security concerns.
“We are very committed to expanding access to the ballot for all voters,” said Susan Greenhalgh, senior advisor on election security for the organization Free Speech For People. “If we could do this securely, we would be right on board leading the charge.”
Cybersecurity researchers have long been warning, she said, that electronic transmission of vote choices is “dangerously insecure to high risk for undetectable manipulation.”
A letter to lawmakers authored by Greenhalgh and other groups pointed to a recent report from four government agencies that categorizes the risk of electronic ballot return as “high.”
Senning said the report also outlines a number of ways states can mitigate that risk, and in his testimony to lawmakers, he urged them to weigh “whether you think the security risk outweighs the benefit to voters being able to return their ballots.”
“For a long time, I think it did,” he said. “But I think this particular technology has developed to a place where the risk is acceptable, based on the number of ballots involved and the ability to allow these voters to cast the ballot when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.”
— Emma Cotton
ON THE MOVE
Buckle up, Final Readers! It looks like we may be in for another late one. As I write this at 5:30 p.m., the House has not yet even begun to delve into a debate over this year’s $8.5 billion budget proposal — AKA The Big Bill. Check this space tomorrow for a recap on how it went down.
— Sarah Mearhoff
On a 30-0 vote, S.100, the so-called HOME bill, received preliminary approval in the Senate on Thursday. But don’t let today’s unanimity fool you. A floor fight is coming tomorrow.
The bill that received the thumbs up Thursday represents a carefully crafted compromise between the Senate’s economic development and natural resources committees. At issue is how much — or how little — to amend Act 250, Vermont’s landmark land-use law. The economic development committee had originally sought to raise the threshold at which the law was triggered to 25 units (from 10); the natural resources panel had dramatically narrowed where that new threshold would apply.
The two committees’ compromise has satisfied environmentalists. But not developers, the administration, nor the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, who have been furiously lobbying for another amendment that will be put forward by Sen. Thomas Chittenden, D-Chittenden Southeast, when the bill is up for third reading Friday. That proposal would reintroduce that 25-unit trigger in towns with zoning and subdivision regulations — a little over half of the state.
— Lola Duffort
With little debate and by a 24-6 vote, the Vermont Senate gave preliminary approval Thursday to a bill that would inject $150 million a year of new funding into the child care sector and create a new parental leave benefit.
The bill, S.56, has undergone a major rewrite since it was first introduced last month. Gone, for example, is a centerpiece of the original legislation: free, full-day pre-K in public schools for all 4-year-olds.
Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, who presented the bill to colleagues on the Senate floor and who had championed the pre-K provision, told her fellow lawmakers that while the bill before them did not have “all the elements” she had initially hoped it would, it still represented “a monumental step forward in expanding access, affordability and equity in the provision of child care in Vermont.”
— Lola Duffort
Vermont House lawmakers approved legislation that would pause a state initiative to test school buildings for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), toxic chemicals linked to a series of health problems.
The House on Thursday passed H.486, which would put the testing program on hold while a task force assesses the needs of Vermont’s school buildings.
“Our students cannot afford another interruption to their learning, and the risk of closing classrooms or schools is untenable,” Rep. Erin Brady, D-Williston, the reporter of the bill, said Wednesday.
— Peter D’Auria
The House granted final approval Thursday morning to H.479, the annual transportation bill, along with an amendment that would increase many of the fees the Department of Motor Vehicles charges — for services such as getting a driver’s license — by about 20%.
That amendment, proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee, spurred a number of floor speeches from Republican legislators who, among other concerns, disagreed with the idea of raising fees on Vermonters at a time of high inflation.
Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s administration also opposes bumping up the fees.
Lawmakers who supported the fee increase have said that inflation was one of the reasons to do so, since most of the fees have not changed since 2016.
House lawmakers want to set aside the revenue generated from the new DMV fees to help plug a longstanding, nearly $80-million deficit in the state’s transportation fund.
— Shaun Robinson
The sheriff reform bill, S.17, cleared the Senate on Thursday after undergoing a few final — and not insignificant — changes.
One amendment touched on a central sticking point of the legislation: the 5% fee sheriffs can pocket for managing their departments’ service contracts.
The bill originally proposed abolishing the fee. The Senate Government Operations Committee added it back in, but said the funds could not be used to compensate the sheriff or other department staff.
The Senate ultimately backed the appropriations committee’s proposed compromise: allowing the fee to be used for compensation this year and next year, under certain circumstances.
The amendment specifies, for instance, that the fee could augment sheriffs’ pay by not more than 50% of their annual salaries if they’ve been in office for at least two years.
The Vermont Sheriffs’ Association has repeatedly told legislators the contract fee brings sheriffs’ compensation in line with that of state law enforcement officers, and is necessary to attract good candidates.
The appropriations panel also removed a different money-related provision. The bill would establish a uniform contract rate that the Vermont Judiciary would pay all sheriffs’ departments for providing courthouse security.
But the rate — which Government Operations had set at $51 an hour, with specified raises — was scrapped, with details to be determined in the annual state budget.
The sheriff bill’s next stop is the Vermont House.
— Tiffany Tan
WHAT WE’RE READING
City-commissioned report recommends status quo for Montpelier’s water system (VTDigger)
U.S.-Canada agreement puts new limits on asylum seekers (VTDigger)
Vermont’s 5 nominees toppled in James Beard semifinals (VTDigger)
‘High temperature juggling’ inside a Burlington glassblowing factory (Vermont Public)