Vermont Secretary of State Responds to Executive Order on “Integrity of American Elections”

Montpelier, VT – On Tuesday, March 25^th President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order on “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” The order promotes baseless myths about elections, proposes significant barriers to voting access, and constitutes an unprecedented overreach of Federal authority.

Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas has issued the following statement in response:

“This executive order is a thinly veiled attempt to disenfranchise wide swaths of the American electorate and would fundamentally degrade the integrity of American elections.

This order would require every Vermonter to re-verify their citizenship status in person at their town clerk’s office. This would not only create a massive and expensive administrative burden; it would create an unnecessary hurdle for anyone who doesn’t have easy access to proof-of-citizenship documents.

To put this in perspective, over 21 million voting-age American citizens do not have access to their proof of citizenship. Additionally, over 70 million married people who have changed their name will need additional proof of identity. Anyone who doesn’t have the money and/or the time – particularly rural populations like that of Vermont – to obtain these documents and go to their elections office to present them will be denied their right to vote. All told, this requirement could impede well over a third of all eligible American voters.

If states do not comply with this and the other unreasonable provisions in the order – and the Trump administration knows many can’t or won’t – the order threatens prosecution of state/local elections officials and the termination of Federal funding, on which Vermont partially relies to operate our elections.

Elections in Vermont are secure. Vermont already meets the purported aims of this order. Our voter rolls are meticulously updated at the state and local level, with scrutiny from over 247 town/city clerks who manage their jurisdictions’ voter checklists. We have a paper trail for every ballot cast and perform an in-depth audit after every General Election. Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in Federal or Statewide elections – all residents in Burlington, Winooski, and Montpelier are allowed to vote only in local/municipal elections.  All told, Vermont’s elections are secured on multiple, decentralized levels. We also strive to make our elections accessible, because we believe in supporting every eligible voter’s right to participate in our elections.

We need to call this Executive Order out for what it is: an effort to disenfranchise voters, intimidate elections workers, and defund the functioning of our democracy. Disenfranchising tens of thousands of Vermonters in the name of preventing the minute chance that a non-citizen might be mistakenly added to the voter registration list will not bring integrity to our elections. It will pull Vermont in the wrong direction. After celebrating 70%+ voter participation in the last two Presidential elections for the first time in Vermont’s history, we should be working to involve even more Vermonters in our participatory democracy – not taking steps to exclude them.

This order would most certainly exclude thousands of rural, hard-working, married or low-income Vermonters from being able to participate in our elections. It would create a hostile environment for elections workers, who have already had to question whether this patriotic work is worth the risks. It would render our elections infrastructure more vulnerable – a process that has already begun with layoffs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) – through continued funding cuts.

The Vermont Secretary of State’s office will pursue all avenues at our disposal to preserve and protect the integrity – and accessibility – of our elections. Our democracy depends on it.”

The Secretary of State’s Elections “Myths v. Facts” page can be found here: https://sos.vermont.gov/elections/election-info-resources/myth-v-fact/

An overview video about election security in Vermont, created with Town Clerks from across the state, can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2TKdTs0o6I