The 2023 Cabot voter checklist contained the names of 1,157 voters for the 2023 town and school district annual meetings. One of these meetings occurred on the evening of March 6, 2023, and the other on the morning of March 7, 2023.
According to the Cabot town clerk, who is the clerk for the town of Cabot and the clerk for the Cabot School District, nine Cabot voters attended the annual school district meeting this year and between 62 and 65 Cabot voters attended the annual Cabot Town Meeting.
Four hundred eighteen Cabot voters voted by Australian ballot at both of these annual meetings.
During October 2016, at a special town and a special school district meeting to adopt Australian ballot for deciding all budgets in the town and in the school district, 100 Cabot voters assembled to vote by the voice vote from the floor electoral method and decided in favor of using the Australian ballot for all budgets proposed by the town and the school district. Those in favor were 75 and 25 opposed.
Why the Australian ballot is not mandated for making this kind of change as the electoral method for voting on elected officials, budgets, and public questions in municipal elections is a mystery to me. As a counterpoint: If a municipality wants to enact a charter for that municipality, that charter must be adopted by Australian ballot.
Voting by voice vote from the floor electoral method significantly disenfranchises a majority of Cabot voters because, unless a voter is present when the moderator calls each warning Item, those voters who are not physically present lose their right to vote on those warning items that are not voted by Australian ballot here in Cabot. This isn’t an issue that is unique to Cabot here in Vermont.
Getting back to the municipality of Cabot, the figures above make it clear to me, at least for the year 2023, that these annual meetings are dead on arrival, in part because not all elected officials or any public questions are voted by Australian ballot. The continued use of the voice-vote-from-the-floor electoral method fosters minority rule here in Cabot and elsewhere in Vermont.
Minority rule is not fostered in a de jure sense but in a de facto sense because the voters are abstaining from voting at the voice-vote-from-the-floor annual meeting and the numbers above tell the story.
I won’t get into why we humans cling to the illusions that we create here in this writing, but the Vermont Town Meeting and its use of the voice-vote-from-the-floor electoral method has been touted as the epitome of the democratic process by some when in my experience here in Cabot, over the last 48 years, I’ve found it to be the antithesis of that democratic process.
Richard Scheiber
Cabot
