With the primary election taking place Tuesday, Aug. 11, only 3% of registered voters had cast their ballot as of Thursday.
The statistic is a new initiative, Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas said, to remind voters of the upcoming election and encourage them to get out and vote.
“I think it’s a good idea to give people a little bit of a blow-by-blow on how turnout is looking, so that … people remember, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right. We have a primary coming up,’” Copeland Hanzas, who is running for reelection, said in an interview.
Copeland Hanzas said there are multiple factors that could play into why early voter turnout is particularly low this year. She acknowledged that, for starters, summer might be a busy time for Vermonters, which makes it all the more important to her that registered voters have multiple ways to vote.
“August is a time of, you know, summer vacation and family trips and relatives from out of town, and it’s a hard time for people to tune in,” she said.
According to data from the Secretary of State’s Office, absentee votes made up only 30% of the total votes in 2024 and 16% in 2018.
In a press release, Copeland Hanzas encouraged Vermonters to avoid mailing back their absentee ballots at this point if they haven’t returned them yet. Absentee voting in the state has been open since June 29, allowing voters to return their ballot early by mail or in person at a town clerk’s office.
The other factor contributing to low early turnout, Copeland Hanzas said, is how much outreach the candidates have done — or not done — to reach potential voters. The pockets of high turnout she said tend to be in the towns where the stakes are higher because of an open seat in the state Senate.
“That’s where we see stronger turnout because those campaigns are the ones that are out there actively working to get out the vote in years like this where we have relatively fewer contested statewide seats,” Copeland Hanzas said.
Only 55 towns have reported voter turnout above the statewide average of 3%, according to data from the Secretary of State’s Office. The three towns leading the list are Shelburne, Calais and Barre Town.
“This is a new statistic we’re rolling out this year to highlight absentee and early voting, but the data going back over the years does show that primary turnout is usually lower than general elections, and that the majority of voters cast their ballot on Election Day,” Wesley Dunn, the communications and outreach coordinator at the Secretary of State’s office, wrote in an email to VTDigger.
Voter turnout for primary elections has typically been slim in past years, with only 15% of registered voters casting ballots in 2024, 27% in 2022 and 34% in 2020, the data shows.
Copeland Hanzas attributed the consistent low voter turnout to “voter confusion,” adding that Vermonters often forget that the process for voting in the primary election is different from the general election.
While every Vermonter automatically receives a ballot in the mail for the general election, only people who request a ballot early receive it in the mail for the primary election.
This was the first time the state had compiled and pushed out data on early voting, she said, in hopes that Vermonters would see the numbers and be motivated to vote.
“I’m of the mind that if you don’t measure it, how do you know whether you’re doing a good job or not,” Copeland Hanzas said. “If we don’t push this information out for media outlets and average Vermonters to look and see how turnout is going, then they won’t know how we’re doing.”
