Vermont Business Magazine Today Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos announced the official results of the Vermont 2018 General Election held on Tuesday, November 6. The 2018 General Election set a record for most votes cast in a Vermont midterm election, with 278,230 voters casting ballots out of 490,074 registered voters. Vermont’s number of registered voters is also at an all-time high.
Vote totals and winners for all federal and statewide offices were certified yesterday by Secretary Condos and a designee from each of Vermont’s three major parties (Democratic, Republican and Progressive). Vote totals and winners for County office, State Senate, and State Representative were canvassed at the town and county level.
“Election Day here in Vermont was a shining example of what healthy democracy looks like,” said Secretary Condos. “The civil discourse among candidates, high voter turnout, and implementation of policies and practices preserving voter rights and access that we saw on Election Day are all reasons to be proud.”
“Ensuring the integrity and accuracy of our Vermont elections is critical to our democratic process, and to voter confidence in that process,” said Secretary Condos. “That’s why we use paper ballots and conduct a post-election audit after every General Election. We want to ensure that there are no anomalies between official results and audited results, and want to give Vermonters peace of mind in the integrity of our elections.”
The 2018 General Election Audit will take place at 10:00AM on Thursday, November 29th at the Pavilion Auditorium, located at 109 State Street in Montpelier. Members of the public and the press are invited and encouraged to attend.
Audit procedure includes a top to bottom audit of every race on each ballot cast in a randomly sampled 5% of voting precincts in Vermont, conducted by an independent third-party contractor. Vermont towns are required to seal and save ballots for 22 months following an election.
The towns randomly selected for audit of 2018 General Election results are Westford (Chittenden 8-3), Mount Holly (Rutland-Windsor 2), Pittsford (Rutland 6), Hardwick (Caledonia 2), Cavendish (Windsor 2), Arlington (Bennington 4) and Glover (Orleans-Caledonia). These towns represent a geographically diverse sampling and include 6 towns which conduct vote counting by optical scan tabulator and 1 which conducts hand counts.
Source: Secretary of State 11.14.2018