By David Delcore
TIMES ARGUS
MONTPELIER, Vt. — Another piece of emergency election-related legislation that would eliminate the petition requirement for those interested in running for public office on Town Meeting Day, could move quickly through the legislature this week.
The Senate Government Operations Committee set the stage for another fast-tracked piece of legislation with its week-ending passage of a bill that includes two safety-first provisions crafted in response to Vermont’s recent record-setting surge in COVID-19 cases.
The bill would do two things, one of which — waiving the petition requirement — has been done before.
A year ago, candidates for local offices, from cemeteries and library trustees to school board members and mayors, were told they needn’t collect signatures on petitions in order to have their names printed on the ballots in their respective communities.
The thinking at that the time was that requiring candidates to collect the signatures of the requisite number of registered voters in order to run for office wasn’t worth the risk given pandemic-related concerns. Those concerns haven’t changed, and on a day when a just-set record of COVID cases was smashed, the Senate committee unanimously agreed requiring prospective candidates to circulate nominating petitions may make even less sense this year.
In most communities the candidates must collect signatures of the 1% of the check list, or 30 registered voters, whichever is fewer, in order to qualify. There are some cases where as many as 60 signatures are required.
The proposed change would not affect the petition requirement for funding requests and other special ballot articles — that deadline is Thursday — but could mean the only signature prospective candidates will need is their own.
Instead of collecting signatures from registered voters, submitting a signed consent of candidate form to municipal clerks on or before the Jan. 24 deadline would guarantee prospective candidates a spot on the ballot during annual elections that are typically held on Town Meeting Day.
The other change — one introduced at the suggestion of Sen. Andrew Perchlik, D-Washington — would temporarily suspend any requirements for commingling ballots cast in the March 1 elections. The practice is employed in some, but far from all, multi-town school districts. It involves ballots from member towns being transported to a single location where they are mixed together before being counted. The process is intentionally blind to how individual towns voted on everything from budgets to bond issues and reports one district-wide result.
Nothing in the proposed legislation would prevent districts from commingling ballots, which has been a common practice in the five-town, six-school Washington Central Unified Union School District. However, if it so choses, the school board could stray from its practice and allow elections officials in Berlin, Calais, East Montpelier, Middlesex and Worcester to separately count ballots and report their results to the district clerk, who would add them together to determine what passed and who was elected.
Things are a bit murkier with respect to a looming regional vote in central Vermont that prompted a constituent’s concern Perchlik relayed to Sen. Anthony Pollina, D/P-Washington, who discussed it with Director of Elections Will Senning and brought it to the committee last week.
At issue is an article that will appear on the ballots of the 18 towns that send students to the Central Vermont Career Center. Those towns are members of one of six separate school districts that send students to the career center, which is based at Spaulding High School in Barre and governed by the board of the Barre Unified Union School District.
That would change under a proposal to create an autonomous school district run by a separate board — including four members who will be elected at-large on Town Meeting Day.
That district doesn’t yet exist, so there is no board to decide whether to stick with a plan to commingle ballots — one that is included in the state-approved articles of agreement for the proposed district and sanctioned by the study committee that proposed the governance change.
“That’s a good question and I don’t know,” Senning said on Monday. “This vote is unique. There’s not currently a governing legislative body to make that call.”
There are arguably six of them. Boards of those school districts — from Barre, Montpelier-Roxbury and Harwood to Washington Central, Twinfield and Cabot — are warning votes for their towns and may have the final say. They may also all have to agree and, while it isn’t clear there’s consensus, that could change if conditions have improved when Town Meeting Day rolls around.
CVCC Director Jody Emerson said one thing that hasn’t changed is a regional study committee’s interest in commingling ballots before counting them.
“The committee did not want to know where an individual town stood (on the proposed creation of the career center district),” she said. “They just wanted to know overall: is this supported or not?’ They didn’t want any finger-pointing (and) they didn’t want any division.”
An added wrinkle is that four of the six districts — Barre, Montpelier-Roxbury, Washington Central and Harwood — are entitled to extra seats on what will be a 10-member board and candidates will be elected by the combined vote of all 18 towns. If there is a contested race there is a possibility the person who receives the most votes in the district they will represent loses when the votes from towns in other districts are added in.
That always will be a possibility based on the proposed framework, but there would be no knowing whether it happened if the ballots were counted in one big batch instead of 18 smaller ones.
Emerson learned of the bill after it already had been voted out of committee Friday afternoon as part of a process that could result in its clearing both houses by the end of the week, as was the case with the town meeting bill last week.
During a recent meeting attended by 16 of the 18 town clerks, Emerson said she thought all pandemic-related concerns had been addressed. The plan wouldn’t have involved rushing ballots from 17 other towns to Barre so they could be commingled and counted after the polls closed on March 1, but establishing a schedule to deliver those ballots, one batch at a time over a period of days. Once all the ballots were delivered they would have been commingled and counted.
“We hope that can still happen,” Emerson said.
david.delcore @timesargus.com
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