 Welcome to the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs. It is Tuesday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day committee. I would like to welcome Representative Burroughs, who is here to give us a quick intro to the Herbill H180 Act relating to standardizing the opening time of polling places. Representative Burroughs, thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me in for the record. I am Elizabeth Burroughs. I represent Windsor One, which is the towns of Heartland, Westminster and Windsor, and I reside in Westminster. And I think that introduction is probably longer than the bill, which simply says that this bill proposes to standardize the opening time for all polling places in the state of Vermont. All polling places in the state already have a standardized closing time up 7 p.m. And if you look at the signers of the bill, the bill as currently drafted, it's the people who supported it are totally tripartisan. It's a love it or hate it bill. And I'm asking you to set the time if you should take this up. I don't care what the time is, although part of the reason for the bill is that there are several, if not many, towns that open well into the morning, which is 10.30, which is really not equitable for people to be able to vote, especially when the polls close at 7 p.m. That's it. That's really it. Are there any questions? It's important they're all at 7 p.m. Everybody closes at 7 p.m. The window opening right now ranges from somewhere, I think 5 a.m. is the earliest. I think Huntington actually opens at 5 a.m. I think Huntington opens at 5 a.m. 7 a.m. is most of the larger towns. I think that's probably the lead in most towns. I have three towns in my district and each opens at a different time. And not that you need a bill to correct the mishandling of the time was by the Secretary of State's office, but they're often misprinted and different types of information coming out to the public and causing confusion. So that's another aspect of it. I was just curious, yeah, if you'd heard from folks in towns that have different or, you know, kind of unique opening times, that would be helpful for them. We had this conversation. We thought, oh, we're the only town that, but one of my towns, the town I live in, doesn't open until 10 and everyone around us is either 7 or 8 a.m. It's two hours less voting. Our town had the Secretary of State's office put out, noticed that our town polls opened like two hours before they actually did. But people did persevere and come a second and third time, three times in several cases to actually be able to vote. So it's a simple bill and it's not meant to stand on its own. Well, as you know, we are going to be hearing testimony on, there's a miscellaneous bill we have on the table that we're going to start taking some testimony on and earn us today. And so I appreciate you coming in and sharing this additional idea for consideration. I talked to several of the clerks who are visiting for Vermont Municipal Clerks and Treasures Association. They were in the card room today and there's a variety of opinions amongst them. So we'll be getting their feedback if the committee feels like we should take further discussion on that. I will say that I heard from one poll operator who was upset at the idea of being forced to open her polls later than she already does. So it goes both ways. Interesting. I feel like the simple idea may have sparked a lot of conversation representatives. So thanks for bringing this. We're not afraid of tackling the tough issues here in House government. Thank you so much for being with us today. Anything else from me? Anybody else have any other questions for representative Burroughs? You can take a chocolate kiss on your way out. Thank you. Thank you. Happy Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. Right. So I have invited representatives from the major parties and some other government groups and over the next couple of days. So we first on our list here have Mr. Paul Dame who's the chair of the Vermont Republican Party. So if you'd like to come and take the witness seat, really appreciate you spending some time with us today. I've asked the folks to give their thoughts in response to the draft miscellaneous elections bill, the 23-0 miscellaneous changes to election laws. And I appreciate you being with us today. Well, thank you for the invitation. It's kind of fun that some of you know, including a representative, I used to be a rep, so it's interesting to be on this side of the table for once. But thanks for the opportunity to weigh in on this. Again, my name is Paul Dame. I am the state chair of the Vermont Republican Party. And I just, you know, there's a lot in here, which I think is kind of interesting. So I just want to go through some of the main points. You know, the first off sort of the sore loser law. I think is something that, you know, we don't really have a problem with. I do, what I do notice here is, is, or a way you can sort of enhance this is, I think you need to decide up front if they're going to be an independent, if they're going to be a Republican or Democrat progressive, they should pick a lane at the beginning of the process and commit to that lane, at least through that election, right? Next election, they can make a different choice. And so I think even if people win a particular primary or they still shouldn't have the option to go into another primary or to run as an independent. So I think what I saw missing there was even if you win a party primary as almost, or would have happened if the election laws were different. We had somebody running one of our primaries whose intention was to take that place and eliminate it on the general election ballot and then run as an independent. So I think that you could add to the sort of loser law a prohibition on even if you win the primary, you still shouldn't get to run as an independent. I think that makes it clear that people are either an independent or they're running in a primary to represent a party. I think it's a good move to line up the filing deadlines. It was always kind of peculiar to me why independence got the file later than everybody knows sort of at the beginning of the process in May that these are the candidates that are going to be on the general election ballot or in the case of primaries where eliminating people who don't make it through the primary. One of the concerns I had was on sort of the organizational reporting. Obviously a lot of the people who are sort of as town chairs, as county chairs, they're doing so in a volunteer capacity. And so I'm a little concerned about putting name, address, phone number information into Secretary of State's office that then becomes publicly searchable without knowing a lot about who's requesting that information, where is it going, who are just everybody in those town and county organizations know that their information is going to be subject to a public records request. Especially when you consider there are other organizations that are involved in political activity that are not parties, you know, PACs and other things who have similar people in volunteer capacities and none of their personal information is getting collected by the Secretary of State. So obviously Republican Party is concerned about privacy and I think this is a place where I don't understand what the public benefit is for names, address, contact info for volunteers on those town committees. On the matter of dual nominations, again, I think what my preference is my goal is making sure we give voters as much information on the ballot as we can. And so when a candidate decides to run sort of as a fusion candidate or get this dual nomination, they're communicating to the voter or they're communicating to voters in those particular primaries that I have some level of support amongst both of those primaries. I think that Vermonters like candidates who can cross the line, work across the line and if we want to encourage that or at least communicate to voters that we have a candidate who has done that or is trying, making an effort to do that. I think that's a good thing and I think it reduces some of the partisan nature of some of the elections by allowing candidates who are doing that to keep those dual nominations. Let's see, for candidate demographic info, I think, you know, we don't have a problem with that, especially I think the fact that it's listed as being optional is appropriate. And then another place where, you know, I think I have a little more concern is on the certification for write-ins, especially because the deadline is so early. A lot of times people don't realize that there isn't somebody, especially for some of these smaller offices, that there's nobody on the ballot until they get their absentee ballot now. And sometimes we've had folks in races where we weren't able to recruit somebody before the deadline decide that, hey, you know, if nobody else is going to run, I'll throw my name in. And so whenever we put a hurdle in front of any voter who wants to participate in the process, especially if they're sort of not part of the regular and traditional, you know, party apparatus, I think it's a good thing. It's a welcoming thing to allow people to enter into the process, especially as a candidate and keep that bar as low as possible. So I think allowing the writing candidate to get on and to be counted and be accepted as a potential winner if they meet the requirements is important. But I also think it's important to count those actual votes. I think that when people want to vote, when people make a write-in vote, it's one of the most intentional votes that you can possibly make. Some of the least intentional are in other states, they have straight party ticket voting, which you may not even know the names of the people that you voted for. But when a voter decides, I'm going to write somebody's name in, you got to know that person's name and you have a really good reason to do something that's sort of out of the normal. So I can't think of a vote that's more intentional than a write-in vote. And what I see in this bill that's concerning is that we're going to count that vote as less. That name isn't going to show up in the official totals there if that person, if it wasn't an official write-in candidate. So that individual who cast that vote isn't going to really feel like their vote got recorded. And I think in a time where folks are, there's greater attention on the election process. Having individual write-in votes show up. I understand it's a little, it's extra work for the town clerks. But I think it gives our voters, the confidence that their vote really does count no matter how sort of outside the mainstream it is. So I think that we would be for leaving the write-in process the way that it is. I think the 25 minimum for house races and at various different offices is appropriate. You've got to have a threshold to actually get elected. But I think it's important to voters, let them know your vote counts and we're going to count even the write-ins there. So I think those were the main parts of the bill that I saw. I think while I'm here, I wanted to mention a couple things that I think we're missing. We've had a little bit of discussion in our party about the primary, especially this last year. And one of the things that seems to be missing is really a party is a brand. And we've, over time, it used to be that the parties would get together in a smoke-filled room and they'd pick people and if you didn't know the right person, you didn't get on the ballot. And we've moved farther away from that to creating probably one of the most open processes that we have. Because we don't have party registration in Vermont, anybody can run on any ballot. And so if I wanted to, I could run for governor as a Democrat, even though I'm the chair of the Republican Party. And I think there's a case where we've gotten so open that we may need to come back towards the middle and give parties some kind of a mechanism either to restrict people from getting on the ballot or at least denoting, hey, this is somebody who the people in the party have talked to is a legitimate and valid candidate. One suggestion is in the state of Connecticut, they allow parties to endorse candidates. While I'm not a big fan of the idea of having a single candidate be endorsed, I think maybe a modification of that would be where you allow the party to maybe have approved candidates. So if you have maybe four candidates and there's somebody who, for whatever reasons, don't meet the criteria of the party, we have rules against that we wouldn't support felons, we wouldn't support other people who've run in primaries and gotten less than a certain percentage before the people we just think aren't viable or aren't representing our party. Then we could say, all right, maybe people are candidates that the state party is amenable to working with and here's somebody who really doesn't belong on our ballot but because we've got an open process, we're not preventing anyone from running but it sends that signal, again, getting more information to the voter that this person is going to be working with the party, this person is not working with the party. I think one of the things I had heard sort of anecdotally, voting in other primaries, the only information you really get on the primary is the name of the town that the person's from and so sometimes that's the only information on the ballot and people will make decisions, sometimes even on statewide races because they haven't heard, maybe they don't watch TV or maybe they don't get email, whatever else. They just say, oh, well, this person's from such and such that that's a more Republican town, a more Democratic, a more progressive town and can make informants there and I think what would be more helpful information for voters is to say, hey, in the cases where a party would want to, they can say, here are two of those three candidates that we would, that we endorse or that we would work with, here's somebody who got on the ballot but is not going to cooperate with the party and allowing also the parties to decide not to do that. I think most of the time, the parties would rather keep their hands clean and not put their thumb on the scale but in those rare cases where there's kind of a reason to break the rule, it would give the parties some control over the brand and over the party that they're communicating to voters. Two other things I think that would be helpful that maybe aren't quite on the same scope of the bill but are still general election related is looking at cleaning up our voter rolls. I think a lot of times we've realized with COVID and sort of the universal mail out ballot how many people are on our voter rolls that don't belong there. I purchased a house four years ago and I got a ballot this year from somebody who hasn't lived there since then and they weren't the person I bought my house from and I was talking to some of the clerks before and it sounds like there could be up to an eight year process from the time that we suspect somebody is not a valid voter anymore until we can actually get them removed. This used to be a problem because we didn't allow people to register after, where it was at the week before the election but now that we have same day voter registration if we ever remove somebody inappropriately, we took somebody off the list before we should have maybe they just didn't vote for two years for whatever reason everyone can get back on the list and cast their ballot on election day. So to me we had this hedge about why we didn't take people off the voter rolls too easy and I think we've solved that problem with same day voter registration. So I think giving town clerks and boards of civil authority who can be a check on that town clerk the ability to remove people who everybody in town knows that they left or whatever the case may be because when we reduce those voter rolls, first of all, we're spending less money mailing out ballots that don't belong places. It's even people who get those ballots and have no ill intention. It doesn't create confidence when you get a ballot mail to your house. It doesn't belong there. And so while there's no reports of anybody doing something like that, there is a confidence issue there. And when we reduce the voter rolls to make them more accurate, it actually shows that Vermont has a higher voter participation. If you think about voter participation in a fraction, if our denominator is too big with people who have moved out of state, if we right size that number, Vermont can report accurately our voter participation score. So we think making it easier for town clerks going through the BCA, shortening that timeframe that they can remove voter rolls. And then obviously, something that the Republican Party has always been looking for is implementing voter ID. And I think especially for same day registration. I mean, one of the issues I had is when I moved, I was on, if I'd gone to the town clerk in Essex, everybody had known me there. I had won elections there before. My name was on the voter roll there. I would have voted no problem. But two weeks before, I had just moved into my new house. And when I went to vote where I was supposed to vote in my new house, I walked in and was able to cast a vote that day. So I think there's still an area there where we, there's potential for people on same day voter registration to vote in more than one location. And we're not even requiring voter ID there. Vermont's the only state that does same day voter registration with no voter ID. So I think at least on same day registration in introducing voter ID is a good safety mechanism to make sure that we're getting the right people voting in the right place. So that's really all I had for any prepared testimony. So I'm happy to take any questions or... Thanks. I think you cover most of the big points and I appreciate some of the feedback. Are there folks on the committee who have questions for Mr. Dean? Representative Byron? How are you? No, thanks for coming in and offering the perspective. So what I wanted to circle back to was the point you were raised or proposed about primary candidates within the party and getting sort of a, I guess sort of a mark of approval from the party apparatus, whatever that may be. So that would be something that would be visibly known on the primary ballot. So let's say just sort of... So I see this correctly in my head, right? Five candidates, two of them a party that's not my favorable for anyone to do, that we would have that mark of sorts. Yep. Okay. And I don't know, I mean just at first, my first instinct sees like there could be ways that can get a little murky, right? It's like how do people go about that to maybe, you know, candidates willingness to donate to a party apparatus maybe coming to play. You know what I mean? I just, it made my stomach do a couple of funny things when I started thinking about it. Yeah. But just for clarification, that's what you're sort of... Well, I think giving parties the option. Partitary, yeah. Right. Giving parties the option to do that would allow them to really control their brand and allow, right? Because what happens, especially with, you know, in certain cases, anybody can get on any party's ballot. There's really no prohibition and broke pages run as a Democrat for governor before. So this would be one way that the party could communicate to voters. This person isn't really playing, you know, within the intent of the party apparatus because our party, our primary system is so open. I think it's just a little bit too open and we've got to do something to fence that in. I would see it as something that parties would probably rarely use, that there would not be any requirement for the party to endorse or approve any candidates, but that they would be able to do that through the same mechanisms that they can fill a vacancy, you know, if somebody were to pass away or something like that. Okay. Yep. I mean, I understand how you're referring to this, but thank you. Representative Burwicky. So with party registrations? I think it could. I'm not an advocate for party registration. I think Vermonters are independent and they like being independent. You know, that party registration, you know, there's games you can play with that too. What would happen is people in certain districts find that one party tends to do well. So they register in that party's primary. You know, we see that a lot, both in Massachusetts and in places like Texas, where the one party is more dominant, but I'm not advocating for party registration. Senator Burwicky. Your denial at the poll same day registration scenario. This is ignorance on my part. Can that only be done at the poll or at the town clerk's office or my question basically is, does the J.P. have the authority to go for register with somebody? They can't come to the poll and just found out they were not on the rolls. So you're saying there's somebody who found out on election day that they're not on the rolls and is unable to go to. Handicap. That might be a better question for the town clerk's. I'm not aware of that scenario. I think that most of the same-day registration is done at the polling place. I don't know if there's been a case of somebody registering, you know, like when you send J.P.'s. I don't know that there's any prohibition on that, but I'm not the authority on that. We could ask director Sending about that when he next is up to testify. He's in the room, so that's the look. John. Representative Nugent. I just want to clarify in terms of the verifying identity at the polls, having been in J.P. for a while, what we would do is that someone could register on the same day, and then they would fill out the voter information form, which does require you to give like a license number. And then after the election, the clerk would go and then verify that. And if it turned out it wasn't accurate, they would do something right after that. But it's not like there's no verification. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's an interesting because in that scenario, the vote has already been placed into the ballot box. So there wouldn't be much that the J.P. could do about it. It's one of the reasons that when I was here before saying same-day voter registration should be done on a provisional ballot. So if we did find that there was something inaccurate about a same-day registration, if it was set aside in those provisional ballots, then before you give the J.P.s or the election officials a day or two to verify the records. And if everything's good, it gets included in with the rest of the votes. And if not, then you've already identified that vote and separated at the time. The thing I wanted to ask about is I heard you say pretty clearly in your testimony in response to the sort of loser proposal that's in the draft language about kind of the strong feeling that to have integrity, you got to stay in your lane. Pick whether you're going to be an I or a D or an R or P at the beginning and follow that all the way through. At least for that election. Next election, you can change your mind. I wanted to contrast that a little bit against your testimony around the sort of dual nominations. Because I've wrestled with this a lot in deciding what to present to the committee to solve, especially the issue which we'll hear more about tomorrow around a relatively small number to write in your own language. And I think it's important for us if there's an open party candidate in like a county election, for instance, you can grab that nod. And there's no way for the local party to say that candidate, they got some of their friends to grab our valid, but they're not with us like they, we don't want our brand to use your, your language. So how would you feel about some, some mechanism, perhaps other than endorsement, like raising the threshold of the percentage of right and mean from parties where they, where they have some say if the person hadn't filed and they want, and they won that right and nod. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that was sort of another angle that I had, had toyed with sort of as a contrast to the kind of approval process is allowing, you know, giving parties some kind of discretion to either, you know, remove names or require something from the, some kind of engagement with the party and the candidate to, to getting their, their name on there, you know, the reason I didn't sort of lead with that is I feel like there's a lot more unintended problems with that. And we maybe move back too far towards that sort of smoke filled room, lack of transparency there where, you know, a party can tell somebody you can't run or we're not going to endorse you or we're not going to let you have the party, the party label. But I think if you gave, you gave parties some kind of mechanism to, yeah, I guess as I had always thought of it, it would be at the beginning of the primary process allowing the parties to say this person, right, we could do an inverse of that saying this person doesn't meet party standards for something. I don't know if it quite addresses the fact that after they've won the primary because they got enough right in votes, that to me seems to be a little stickier situation because they've already won the election. And how do you, how do you eliminate sort of nefarious actors and still encourage genuine kind of grassroots engagement? It's one of those things where you're going to, you're going to make an error somewhere and if you're going to make that error, I would rather make the error that includes greater participation from people who maybe haven't understood the process before. But I think, you know, creating some kind of mechanism where the party gets a check after the primary. I don't know what that would look like but that's something I could see myself supporting with some details. Well, I'd love to encourage the committee to think about this particular issue that's been on my mind since last August and we're going to hear some testimony tomorrow morning about this very thing. So that threshold issue of if you're already on one party's line, what should it really take to get the other major party nominations? I think it's a key fundamental question that I wanted this committee to look at and put in this bill. I really, really appreciate you being here. Chair Dan, I know, you know, we're from opposite parties and you've really done a thoughtful job of responding to some of the things we put on the table. And I really welcome that feedback. Thank you for being here today. Well, I'm glad to do it. Thank you. So next up, I believe Mr. Ronsky is here, the executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party. Welcome to the House of Ops. Thank you. Thanks for being with us today. Yes, thank you for inviting me. So my name is Josh Ronsky. I'm the executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party. I've been in this position since 2016. So I've been through a few election cycles at this point. Yeah. So I'll just get right into it. You know, we don't have a decent number of the proposal. We don't have strong feelings about. So I really want to focus on a few, a few key areas, one of which being the elimination of candidates to run as fusion, fusion candidates, either D slash R or D, PD, PDR, whatever. We've had all combinations of fusion candidates in Vermont. So just, you know, a few quick facts on fusion voting and how it kind of operates in reality, at least in the past election. So in the past, in 2022, there were a total of 69 fusion candidates that ran in Vermont. And eight of them were P slash D, 10 were D slash D, 16 were D slash R, and 30 were R slash D, and then another five were R and libertarian. So 69 majority of those are not progressive party candidates. I'm just kind of saying that to, you know, show this is something used by all political parties. So fusion is really popular among Vermonters. Of the 69 candidates who ran using fusion, I believe 60 of them actually won, including seven P slash D's, eight D slash P's, 16 D slash R's, and 29 R slash D's. A large number of those are in the county level. So 32 were county. There were two statewide 18 fusion candidates, one in the Vermont House and eight fusion candidates, believe in the Vermont Senate. So this is something that, you know, it's being used on every level of government, you know, from the county to state and statewide office by all different political parties. And it's been, you know, fairly popular. Vermonters like it. And I think a major reason why Vermonters like fusion voting is because they appreciate when the parties can actually work together and collaborate on a candidate. I think we see so much vitriol at the national level and even in Vermont that when the political parties get behind the same candidate in certain races, you know, Vermonters do appreciate that. And I think that's, that's not a bad thing. We're not the only state that uses fusion voting. There are eight states in total. The biggest one, one of the biggest being New York state, which has a long history of fusion voting. They do it a little bit different than us, rather than having a R slash D or P slash D on the ballot. They have different ballot lines. So there are different ways, you know, if there was interest in reforming how fusion voting operates, there are different ways that, you know, we could, we could do that. But in general, yeah, we are very opposed to the idea of eliminating a candidate's ability to run with two different party labels. Vermont, yeah, has a long tradition of allowing open affiliation with whatever political party you choose. And it really feels like, you know, I heard my colleague on the Republican party talk about how it's good for voters to have more information and fusion voting is a really good way to do that. What better way for a voter to understand where someone's values lie than by actually having those multiple party labels on the ballot? Like, if you're running as a P slash D, there's a very clear understanding that, you know, you have the support of both progressives and Democrats and you lean more towards the progressive side of the spectrum ideologically. If you're running as an R slash D or a D slash R, it's good for voters to know that both Republicans and Democrats are supporting your candidacy and you're running more to the center, potentially. And maybe you're a bridge builder between those two parties. So, you know, it really doesn't feel like something that there's a problem that we should be looking to address. It feels like this is something that has worked very well in Vermont and it should be continued. So, moving on to some of the other, the idea that we're going to eliminate, you know, as it's often referred to the second by the Apple or the sore loser provision, we also disagree with that. Yeah, I would wonder how many times that has actually happened in recent number in Vermont. I don't think it's a very common instance and generally the progressive party, we discourage folks. Do you have your question? I'll just say it happened here. Yes. Or against me. Okay. Yeah, so it doesn't happen very frequently, although it does happen generally, at least speaking for the progressive party, we discourage folks within our party from doing that because generally if you do lose a Democratic or a progressive primary, you're not likely to then go on and win the general. At the same time, I would point out the fact that Vermont has a huge issue with uncontested races, right? So I believe about a third of all races in Vermont in the past election were uncontested and that's a huge problem, right? And this has a potential to actually make that worse, right? So if we're saying that you can't run in the general election, if you lost the nomination of one political party, that's eliminating more people from being able to run on the general election ballot. And with so many uncontested races, I think really we should be looking at ways to expand the ability of people to get on the ballot and make that easier and not make it more challenging for people to get on the ballot. The same thing is true with the restrictions. So the write-in campaigns, it just feels like it's a weakening of the Democratic process and further cutting down the ability of writing candidates to actually get on the ballot. And as my Republican colleague said, we have a long proud tradition of counting every vote in Vermont and I think that that's really a good thing if someone is going out and putting their name down and putting a name of a candidate down as a writing candidate, that vote should be counted and we should have a good sense of how many write-in votes and who those write-in votes are for. Because even if they're really unlikely to get elected and I do understand it is a lot of extra work for the town clerks and I appreciate that. It is important for voters to see where those write-in votes are going. And yeah, just the last piece I would comment on, the idea that we're going to eliminate the campaign distribution limits for candidates between candidates and political parties, I don't think that's a good thing that we should be supporting. Vermonters in general, I believe, want us to get more money out of politics and there are already ways for candidates to, you know, if you're done running for office and you want to donate the money, you can already donate that money to Charity or other ways. And we shouldn't be creating more avenues to funnel money into the political system and avoid campaign consciousness limits. We should be looking at ways to lessen the amount of money in our political system. So, yeah, those are some of the key points on the actual bill and I would say, you know, there are a lot of issues with our current system and there are reforms that we would support and we think that are really valuable for this committee and others to look into. Those include systems such as rant-choice voting, which would expand, you know, our democratic and enhance our democratic system. We could look at what other states have done in terms of creating a unified primary system. That's an interesting model that's worth exploring and we should also be looking at public financing of elections. So, those are all the types of reforms that we support or at least support exploring. But, yeah, eliminating fusion voting and eliminating second bite of the apple, we do not support it all. And that's all I have for my testimony. Happy to answer questions. What's happening? Josh, thanks for coming. Could you give us a rundown on the unified primary system? Yeah, so the unified primary system, and this is not, we haven't, this isn't like a statement of support, it's just something I think is worth looking at. So, basically, you have a single primary and every political party candidate runs. So, there could be like three Democrats, three Republicans, three progressives for one seat all on that same primary election ballot. And the top two. Independence in that case. I believe that it probably depends on how it's actually structured, how the law is structured. Yeah, so that's a good question, I'm unsure. And it would probably depend on like how the law would be written here, whether you want to include independence or not. But the idea is then you're narrowing it down to two candidates from the, from that primary ballot. So, you could end up with, you know, in a very conservative district, you could end up with two Republicans in the general election or you could end up with a Democrat and a Republican or a Republican and a progressive. So, it's a way to kind of, you have everyone on the same ballot initially and then it moves on to a second round, essentially. Representative Byron. So, in the last election cycle primary 2022, how many standalone ballots were cast for progressive candidates? You're talking about in the primary. I'm actually not sure I don't have those numbers on me right now. I'm sorry about that. Yeah, it's easily accessible on the, yeah, Secretary of State. Yeah, because we did see them. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I remember being a little surprised at how it actually slowed like that number was as it compared it. So, if hybrid candidates were no longer a lab moving forward, you think that would actually build up voter enthusiasm for a straight D candidate instead of a hybrid going on the Democratic Party candidate. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there is. Yeah, and I think it's on all sides, right? So, we hear all the time, you know, Republicans are, I would push back on that a little bit. I think, you know, we saw in the Chittenden County state's attorneys race in Chittenden County, a lot of Republicans voting in the Democratic primary to vote for Sarah Fair George's opponent, right? And that's, you know, the potentially thousands of people or at least hundreds and hundreds of people. You know, we see that in gubernatorial races, how many votes did, you know, Phil Scott get on the Democratic, you know, right in votes to Phil Scott get in the Democratic primary. And I'm sure some of those are Democrats, but I think a lot of Republicans, if they see a contested race and a Democratic primary for their district, they do choose to pull the Democratic ballot. So we have an open primary system, exactly because we want to give voters the choice of reelection and which primary they want to vote in. And that happens all the time. And yes, certainly there are progressives who go vote in the Democratic primary, but you're allowed to do that in Vermont. That's, you know, that's part of our political tradition and that's a very good thing. Would that shift if we ended fusion voting? I think certainly there would be more people voting in the progressive primary, as there would probably be more people voting in the Republican primary as well, if they had to kind of, people had to choose in the same election. But yeah, and we may very well have more freeway races on the state level, statewide level and the house level. I think that's certainly a possibility as well. But yeah, I don't think that's the direction that Vermonters want us to go. I think we want to continue this tradition of allowing the political parties to work together on candidates when those candidates choose to. Josh, do you think that, so I think one of the key things you said that struck my ear was this idea of providing information to voters and I don't know how we would do this, but do you think it would resolve some of the concern that folks who support eliminating the fusion voting if there was a clear indication, for instance, in the legislative level of who are you going to caucus with or do you have a party's endorsement? Because one of the things I've struggled with as we've considered these policies and considered, you know, making modifications in primaries over the years is I do really care about the integrity of what it says on that ballot and what it's communicating to voters and what our system being as open as it is where a county candidate can get a couple hundred votes and get a party's endorsement that they have no connection to. Do you think there's any mechanism that your party or you would support to clarify for folks who really is affiliated with a party as opposed to just happening to get a small number of writings on an open line? Yeah, and I think up a little bit of that is on the party. We have that issue all the time, right? It's no secret that as a political party we don't run candidates in most races and that's intentional because we are the smallest of the major parties at this point and we run races strategically where we feel like we want to focus our energy and that does create openings in both statewide and local races for candidates to do exactly what you're saying who have no affiliation with us to win those write-in votes and political parties can address that by running candidates and those races even they can run and then withdraw. That's like one option that parties have and that does happen all the time. I believe the Republicans did that for most of their statewide races or many of their statewide races in the last election. So a little bit of that is kind of, I think could be on the political parties to fight that and it's on them to kind of organize in those communities where they're worried about that. Raising the write-in threshold I think, I haven't thought about that fully but that's something that might be worth looking into. Again, I would also look at how many times has this actually happened and I know there are some of you like high-profile cases from this past election but I would really want us to think about how frequently is that an issue versus is it just one or two high-profile instances that we're looking to change the entire kind of election system around? Representative Cooper. Mr. Chair, do you mind if we explore some hypotheticals with some historical context? So just keep in mind we have one more witness on this topic and we're going to take a moment and switch gears. So if it's more something, if you have specific questions for Mr. Ronsky and the progressive party's position on the bill I'd say let's do that now. If you want to throw some things on the table we'll have time to have lots of committee discussion on this bill because we'll be working on it for a while. I understand. I really appreciate that. I don't want to cycle things. I want to make sure we're asking questions and discussing things at the right time. Great, well any final questions for Mr. Ronsky? Great, thank you so much for being here, Josh. Thank you so much, I very much appreciate the opportunity and good luck with your work. And our last witness on this topic today is Paul Burns, he's the Executive Director at V-PURG. And Paul, thanks for being with us today. Thank you very much Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. For the record my name is Paul Burns. I'm the Executive Director of V-PURG which is the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. And it's a pleasure to be here. I have had an opportunity many times over the last 22 years that I've been doing this work for V-PURG to address this committee. As committee members may know, V-PURG works on a broad range of issues from the environment to democracy, to healthcare, to consumer protection, et cetera. And democracy, kind of writ large, is one of the areas where I am chiefly involved as one of the advocates for the organization. And I do have a long history here. So again, a pleasure to be here. Since it is my first time before the committee this year I want to just provide a brief context and I want to make sure I get it right so I'm going to read some of this. I have been the Executive Director of V-PURG again for more than 22 years. V-PURG itself has operated as a 501C4 nonprofit in Vermont for 51 years. Since 1975 we have also had a 501C3 charitable nonprofit organization called Vermont Public Interest Research and Education Fund. And in the last several years we became active in candidate elections for the first time launching V-PURG Votes and V-PURG Votes Action Fund, a coordinated political committee and an independent expenditure committee respectively. In my testimony today I will be representing V-PURG, the advocacy arm with which you are no doubt most familiar. And I will note for the record that V-PURG has long been involved in policy matters related to democratic reform, including campaign finance, disclosure, lobbying, ranked choice voting and various measures that have helped to make it easier for people in this state to vote. And today I'm obviously focusing on the miscellaneous elections bill before you. And broadly I would say that there are parts of the bill that V-PURG supports, parts that we oppose, other parts that we don't have any formal position on. And I know the time is brief and so I'd be happy to come back if that's helpful to you, but let me just kind of run through some of the top lines. We support the provision in Section 8 allowing for the voluntary filing and collection of candidates demographic information. We believe this is important so Vermont can better track how we're doing as a state when it comes to having people in office provide fair representation for the state as a whole. We believe that it's valuable to have various perspectives helping to shape the debate and decide the policy on lots of different issues and priorities. Collecting these data will allow the state, individuals, organizations and candidates to assess where we are and what improvements might be made. The fact that the data collection is voluntary should help to resolve or remove any concerns about privacy. V-PURG also supports some of the provisions that deal with writing candidates. Specifically, I think serious writing candidates should not be dissuaded by the requirement to file with appropriate state or local officials in the days leading up to an election. Such a requirement eases the burden on local election officials. Lord knows that would be a good thing. And I think where less serious writing candidates this would be the case where less serious writing candidates have almost no chance of winning. There are other aspects of the writing policy which we are not taking a kind of a formal position on today. Be happy to kind of think about it and provide more information later if that's helpful. But there are two significant provisions of the bill. However, the V-PURG opposes. The first is section six relating to the cross nominations. It's our position that voters benefit from the opportunity to see all candidate party endorsements that a candidate receives. Cross nominations may tell us something useful and important about the candidate and their beliefs. Conversely, we see no value in denying voters the chance to see that a candidate has received the nomination of multiple parties. We don't believe that this is a problem that needs to be fixed and indeed it was mentioned there are opportunities even to strengthen fusion voting. I come from New York State originally and I will just say that my father was a local elected official for 22 years, a county legislator there. His districts were about the size of yours with 4,000 plus constituents. He first ran for office as a Democrat but was cross endorsed by the conservative party. And he had a lot of friends in our small town who assured him they would never have voted for him on the Democratic line but because they could vote for him on a separate line as a conservative, he ultimately won that election. He served primarily as a Democrat for 11 years and then switched to a Republican. So my background is very by or try partisan in that respect I guess from the family history. But I'm not really proposing that you move that direction on fusion voting here but that's what New York has as your name is literally listed multiple times for each political party where you have an endorsement and that does give I think voters an option that they otherwise do not have, gives them that freedom. I mean we can criticize but voters some voters feel very strong and I'm never going to pull the lever under this political party but I would under another. So it kind of frees them up to vote for a candidate if they receive multiple party endorsements. And it gives those smaller, tend to be smaller political parties a little bit more credibility and power in an election process as well by getting involved in a race like that can tip the balance and has in states like New York or Connecticut and others. Moving then to the question of campaign finance in this bill, this is the provision that would allow candidates to give on liberty contributions to political parties. We have been very active on campaign finance issues for decades. Our belief is that elections and races are not benefited by allowing for unlimited contributions from any source. In fact we think the opposite is true, unlimited contributions or expenditures from very wealthy individuals, candidates, parties or corporations tend to have a corrupting influence over the process. I was at the US Supreme Court in February of 2006 when the Vermont case on campaign finance reform was heard before the US Supreme Court. It was kind of a proud moment. V. Perk had played a role in passing that law to begin with in 1997 here. And you may recall that law set strict limits on campaign contributions, $200 to state rep candidates, $300 for Senate candidates and $400 for statewide candidates. Quaint, I guess, today but those were the limits that went to the Supreme Court. And that law also passed with an absolute limit on what candidates could spend in their races. That was intentionally, you could say, constitutionally provocative because of the Buckley v. Vallejo decision that had come down in 1976, essentially saying money equals speech and you can't limit what candidates spend in their races. However, I would point out that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals just below the US Supreme Court upheld Vermont's provisions on both contributions and on that expenditure limit. And had the US Supreme Court make-up been a little bit different, for instance, had the 2000 election been decided a little bit differently in the state of Florida, we maybe wouldn't have lost that on a 6-3 Supreme Court decision and perhaps would have prevailed there. Oh, I really hesitate to interrupt your testimony, but I just want to ask you a question on this specific thing and I held off from asking Mr. Ronsky when he characterized this provision in a similar way. I supported putting this suggestion into this bill because I believe that in a post-citizens United World the most transparent way that we keep track of who's spending money on what is to have candidates raise money report who's getting those contributions and then if they want to work with their party to help get themselves elected, hire staff, etc., they should be able to freely do that as long as it's totally transparent how they're spending. That's why I supported this increase just from candidates to their parties, so that there is transparency because the reality in a post-citizens United World is there are lots of ways that you can get the money there, but they're the least transparent ways. So I'm wondering if you could just make up, like, respond to that version of the framing of why that provision is in the bill. The Supreme Court has made probably difficult to achieve a lot of the aims that I'm guessing we may share, the values that we would like to see in elections. I grant that that is absolutely the case. So the question has often come down to, well, maybe is transparency the way to go and just have greater transparency and no limits on contributions and expenditures. And we have maintained the belief that that is not the way to go to move away from reasonable limits on contributions. And you can look at reasons why. Why do people give to candidates? I think most people give so that they can help that candidate get elected to office, not necessarily so that that candidate can turn around and use that money for some other purpose, even backing up the political party that that candidate happens to belong to. So you can ask, you know, is that the right way to allow for that kind of money to flow through the system? We are in a sense allowing our laws to be circumvented by, if we were to allow candidates to make unlimited contributions. I think the also the idea of unlimited is also giving me and perhaps others pause here. And is that really necessary? I mean, how many candidates can we imagine who are going to make a contribution of a million dollars to a political party here? And yet one could with this kind of thing, perhaps a retiring U.S. senator might decide that he or she wanted to make that kind of a contribution to a party. And I don't think that would be fair. I mean, I don't think that really is what was intended by the people who made those contributions to that candidate. And I don't think that's really fair for our election system here that one party could be advantaged in that massive way by the decision of one individual who happened to use the wealth that they accumulated by receiving these contributions. So that scenario that you talked about is current law today for senators, members of Congress that are elected from Vermont. They can make those contributions unlimited. And the proposal we have before us is to say statewide candidates for governor, secretary of state, et cetera, could also do that. Yeah. Would V-PURG feel more inclined to support or be neutral if we came up with some reasonable threshold because $10,000 in the modern era is just it's absurdly small. It asks statewide candidates to get PACs to contribute on their behalf and that is the least transparent way to run an election. $10,000 for a statewide race from their campaign to a party doesn't allow for hardly any collaboration. I mean it wouldn't pay one fraction of one staff person salary, for instance. So that's just the kind of thing I'm wrestling with with Bill is how do we have some reasonable way for a statewide candidate to coordinate with a party without having an end run around our transparency system? Yeah. To be clear, we don't support the idea that the federal candidates can spend their money that way. It's not clear, but I understand there's a problem. And yeah, I mean unlimited is particularly problematic. We're talking about something else and yes, we can have some conversation about that. We have probably enough said there but be happy to revisit. We have commented on these laws. We commented on $10,000. We comment on all the others that are in place now. These are aspects of Vermont law that we have been rather involved in over the year. So we'd be happy to engage in further conversation. Representative, thank you. In any case, if you've never been to the US Supreme Court, I encourage you to go. It is democracy in action and even if you don't win the case it is an awesome thing to see and observe and to be there as Vermont's campaign finance law was debated in front of the Supreme Court and it was a really special experience. It happened that Ann and Nicole Smith was there on the same day having her case argued and that's another story. So those are the chief provisions that in this bill there are others that we really don't have an organizational position on. I know there are keen interest to this committee and you've received some other testimony and consideration there. They're just not things that D. Perg itself has weighed in on at this point. I would say that in terms of other ways of looking at these elections and how they might move forward I encourage the committee to be open to ideas like banning corporate contributions, direct corporate contributions to candidates. This is something that we have been supporting for years. The Senate has passed that legislation a few times. We hope that it will be taken up again this year. As part of that bill they've also looked at ways to improve our public financing system which is on the books today but it is not really an effective or usable system for those who are serious candidates if they intend to get elected. Why do we keep a law on the books that is like that? I mean it maybe makes us feel good that we've got public financing but if it's not real I don't think that's a good thing and so we encourage you to consider ways to change that. There are ideas like democracy dollars that has been used in a couple of elections in Seattle that we are particularly supportive of and that was listed specifically in previous legislation that was passed by the Senate. I think you know we support ranked choice voting. We're very active in the Burlington town meeting day which will be a proposal to expand ranked choice voting there. It will also be used in all district city council races in Burlington and was used effectively in the December 6th special election for a city council race in Burlington went really well. We'd love to come back and talk more about that at some point. Ranked choice voting has also been paired with something similar to what Mr. Ronsky spoke of earlier which is a kind of a winnowing of the field in the primary and there's something called final four or final five policies that are in place in other places. So for instance some of you may have watched Alaska the special election for the congressional seat in Alaska got a lot of attention because both Sarah Palin and Santa Claus were running in that race and it was ultimately won by a Democrat but the way they run the primary there is that you can be of any political party or I believe independent candidates as well and the top four move on to the general election whatever party could be four republicans, four democrats, whatever mix etc. and then that general election is decided on a ranked choice voting ballot and so you choose those candidates and you can rank them one to four or choose not to if that's your preference but that's the way the Alaska special election and the general election were held and that is how Senator Murkowski was also re-elected a relatively moderate Republican and there was concern that there was no way she's going to win a Republican primary in Alaska anymore unless it had an open process like this and that is one of the reasons why Alaska moved forward a fairly red state in terms of national politics and adopted ranked choice voting to allow for a more moderate candidate giving that more moderate candidate the possibility of moving forward in the election so I just encourage you to think about that there are other ways of going forward and we support as a kind of a first step in this field simply using ranked choice voting for the next presidential primary here which would be in obviously next year in 2024 half dozen or so states are already using ranked choice voting in the presidential primary and there the key incentive I think is that by the time the primary takes place in Vermont we now have mail-in voting that many people use but if you vote early good chance well it's not uncommon for the candidate you supported when you set your ballot in is no longer in the race by the time our primary takes place and thousands of Vermonters have been disenfranchised or their votes have been wasted when a candidate has dropped out before the primary even takes place here in case of the presidential and I think that's one of the most important reasons to consider ranked choice in that situation I know that's not what you're considering as part of this so I will just say while we're on it I know Senator Hardy our counterpart is taking a lot of testimony on ranked choice voting I imagine that we'll have a charter change bill from Burlington if that measure to expand the RCB there passes so that is a topic that I would encourage the committee to start doing your your reading on because there's a lot to it and another key part is a big advocate for I'm sure we will be talking about RCB later in the session forward to it thank you and thanks so thanks very much for the opportunity to provide testimony be happy to answer any questions questions for Paul really I was the only one representative Paul in an ideal world how soon would we adopt ranked choice voting outright I think there are probably steps that we would take as a state so again I think giving voters statewide the opportunity to try out ranked choice voting on a ballot where it's the only thing on the ballot presidential primary has real merit there's no confusion there for the voters that there's multiple offices some with ranked choice some without so I think getting a chance to try that out in a presidential primary where again a number of states have done it we're not inventing the wheel here we can look to how they have done it and participate in broad public education around it in that instance as well I think from there we would probably look at the federal races here US Congress and US Senate there are no issues about constitutionality for those offices that they exist now Maine for instance has used it Alaska as I mentioned in other states are looking at that as well and so I think that could happen you could look at that in 2026 or something like that but then I think you move forward there are other questions I will say with respect to statewide offices I think it may make a lot of sense for governor and lieutenant governor here where we have we'll all do respect a very undemocratic process if a candidate running for governor receives less than 50% it goes to all of you to decide on a secret ballot who our governor is that's unusual and not very democratic to be perfectly honest and the last time that happened in a gubernatorial race there were nearly 70 legislators who voted for the second place finisher in that case and again well I'll just say I don't think that's the best process I would love to see this but there are constitutional questions there that would need to be addressed we think it would be constitutional others take a different opinion about that because of the way that our specific constitutional language says it goes to the legislature nobody gets 50% overall you endorse an incremental approach I think that makes sense and that's exactly the path that we're on with Burlington the largest city and moving to expand it potentially for presidential primaries and then federal and then we'll see I think we will definitely be having you back Mr. Burns so thank you very much for bringing the perspective to our bill we're going to have represented Blumlee in it in just a bit so I want to give the committee 10 minutes so we'll go off live and be back at 333 233 not 333 welcome back to the second half last day testimony here the House Government Operating Military Affairs Committee I want to welcome Representative Blumlee and you're going to talk to us a little bit about I'm forgetting the bill number H226 which is an act relating to candidate information to be provided by the Secretary of State which I got out a little bit ahead of you with some of our committee bill language but here you are that's alright it's always nice when somebody likes an idea to put it into something else so for the record Representative from Burlington so some of you may know that in a past life between 1998 and 2015 I ran an organization called Vermont Works for Women which was focused specifically on increasing women's economic opportunity and their abilities support themselves and their families and I came to this body many many times never imagining I would actually sit in this body and I was asked to testify on our programs and the need for them and to do that I needed state employment and state sponsored training data broken out by gender year after year it was never available and so in 2015 in frustration I founded another non-profit initiative called Change the Story which focused on developing that data and because changing the story really hinges upon telling the story the value of demographic data enables us to know more about those who are being served by the programs that we fund who we may not be reaching and it helps flesh out a picture of where we are and can indicate where we might want to to dedicate energy moving forward study after study has demonstrated the benefits of diversity to teams of scientists to workplaces to bodies like this and this body and the administration have been really clear about our need to attract and support a more diverse workforce and encourage people to come and move here and to do that we really have to work to make Vermont a place where equity matters and one of the measures by which we can measure our progress against that goal is how well Vermont's full complement of perspectives and experiences are engaged in shaping local and state policies and problems knowing the current representation of women people of color and young people serving in elective office at every level of government enables us to know more about voices and experience we might be missing at health organizations who work with marginalized communities better understand the work that must be done to achieve equality of representation and ask for data about representation and the length of terms can inform and potentially encourage people to run for office there's no single publicly available repository of data on the name, age, gender race or term expiration of locally elected officials in Vermont this demographic data is also not collected for legislative or statewide officials the bill that I introduced seeks to remedy that situation by collecting this data from local candidates and requiring municipal clerks to pass it on to the secretary of state's office when filing local and statewide election results for the victors and collecting this data from legislative and statewide candidates when they file for candidacy with the secretary of state's office so only information on individuals elected not all candidates would be forwarded to the secretary of state which reduces its burden on the secretary of state and the secretary of state's office would make the data available to the public on its website so the bill that I offer for your consideration is really largely embedded into in your current new bill only such changes between the bills are the following are four things my own inclusion of school board members I think that conversations with ledge council and others have convinced me that that is hard enough to crack because there isn't a direct pipeline of that information to the secretary of state's office the use of the word municipality instead of town and county I don't care what you will know this committee what is the better term to use including the end date of the particular office's term because there are you know in many city councils staggered terms so it's helpful for people to know when is this person's term ending and so when might they be up for reelection and then your bills very explicit acknowledgement that candidates are not required to fill out their own demographic of information they will not be penalized for it the information I mean the nothing whatever they fill out will be accepted by the the local official and the secretary of state as long as the signatures required have been collected so so I I support completely the acknowledgement that acknowledging in the terms that you have in your committee bill this um uh I've lost my words today I'm sorry there have been too many I've written too much testimony today too many numbers but I think it's really important to leave this as a voluntary thing because I think that some people will choose to fill it out some people will not and nobody should be penalized for not filling it out but it will if the provision in your bill which adopts provisions in my bill were passed and we would have a single authoritative repository of information by which we could then measure progress in terms of the diversity of the diverse representation of our cities and state I apologize you know what I'm trying to say okay thank you representative and I want to appreciate and acknowledge that you are on our hallowed and hardworking appropriations committee so I really appreciate your time especially um representative Blumlee I think you did a great job of laying out why I was happy to include this idea and I guess my question is do you feel like we have captured the spirit of what you were hoping to do in 206 in the miscellaneous bill I know that we and I was talking to the legislative council and the elections division are some concerns about the logistical around school board members you're sort of willing to figure out how to gather that information I appreciate that I have no problems with the bill submitted I think it would be very helpful to include the end date of a particular office's term in that database but that's everything else I think is great and I'd be grateful if um you could help satisfy this lifelong quest of mine for to be a place where one could go for this kind of data any questions for representative Blumlee no alrighty well sorry that I tripped over my words anyway very nice to see you all and thanks very much for the work you're doing