Analysis: Vermont’s Voting Rights Act Shrank. What’s Left Protects Candidates More
Sold by supporters as the state’s landmark protection for voters, the bill emerged from the House with its voter-facing machinery stripped — and new protections for the people who run for office.
When you walk into your polling place this August, you may see a name on the ballot for a legislative or county seat and have no assurance the candidate has disclosed where their money comes from — what they do for work, what stocks they hold, whose boards they sit on.
A disclosure law already on the books was supposed to require that. Under a bill Gov. Phil Scott signed Monday, the requirement stands but its penalty does not: candidates for State, county, and legislative office who file late face no penalty through May 30, 2027, spanning this year’s primary and general.
The provision sits inside S.298, which the Governor’s office listed by the title it now carries: An act relating to voter protections. It did not start there. It started as the Vermont Voting Rights Act — and the distance between those two titles is the story.
What was sold, and what passed
As introduced and passed by the Senate in March — 28-0, with two senators absent — S.298 was the kind of state voting-rights act that supporters had pointed to in California, New York, and Washington. It would have created a new Chapter 59 of Title 17 with real enforcement machinery: a pre-clearance system requiring towns to clear election changes with the Attorney General; multilingual ballots and materials wherever a language minority crossed a population threshold; a cause of action against at-large election systems that dilute minority voting strength; a dedicated Voter Education and Outreach Fund; and a fix to so-called prison gerrymandering, counting incarcerated Vermonters at their home addresses rather than their prison towns for legislative redistricting.
Most of that is not in the version Scott signed. The version that took effect keeps a vote denial-and-dilution standard — enforceable by the Attorney General, with civil penalties up to $5,000 for a first violation and up to $25,000 for subsequent ones — and places it inside the existing elections-offenses chapter rather than a standalone act. It revises provisions on interference with voters and election officials. It lets candidates spend campaign funds on security: monitoring systems, protective detail, cybersecurity. And it suspends the disclosure penalties.
That last pairing is the one to sit with. The provisions the final bill adds most concretely — a pause on the accountability candidates face, and a new category of spending they can put campaign money toward — run to the people seeking office. The voter-facing enforcement the bill was built around did not survive.
There is a case for the pause. The State Ethics Commission, which would levy the penalties, has told lawmakers it lacks the staff to enforce them this cycle regardless — and the bill pairs the suspension with a mandate that the Commission and the Secretary of State report back by January 30, 2027 on how to manage the disclosure forms going forward. Read charitably, it is a transitional bridge. Read plainly: a bill that began as new protection for voters became, in its final form, a pause on the disclosure candidates owe the public and a new use for their campaign cash, while the machinery meant to protect voters was struck out.
Why it shrank
The narrowing happened in the House Government Operations and Military Affairs Committee, through a series of rewrites in April that ran from Draft 1.9 to Draft 5.1. The committee record shows who lawmakers heard from in those weeks: town clerks and the clerks’ association, and repeated appearances by the Secretary of State’s office. The recurring question was capacity — whether Vermont’s small towns and its election administrators could carry the weight of pre-clearance and language-access mandates in a state with a small minority population. By the time the committee finished, the enforcement structure was gone.
One thing was broadened rather than cut: the surviving protection covers Vermonters with disabilities, not just race, color, and language minorities. Members of REV UP Vermont, a disability-rights group, testified before the House committee during the rewrite.
The casualty no one announced
The quietest loss is the prison-gerrymandering provision. It was in the bill the Senate passed 28-0. It would have changed how rural prison-town districts and incarcerated people’s home communities are counted for representation in Montpelier. It is not in the signed law.
Scott signed S.298 Monday in a batch of sixteen bills. He issued statements on two of them. Neither was this one.
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