Deputy Secretary of State Lauren Hibbert looks on as the Senate debates an election reform bill at the Statehouse in Montpelier on Monday, June 16, 2025. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Gov. Phil Scott signed a package of changes to Vermont’s election procedures into law this week, among them an expansion of who has to file campaign finance disclosure forms and a restriction on candidates running in a general election who’ve lost a preceding primary election.

The changes are part of a bill, H.474, that nearly did not make it over the finish line this year. The House and Senate approved the bill on the final day of this year’s legislative session, June 16. Before that, though, the legislation appeared all but dead after Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, tied its political fate to an unrelated charter change proposal he was backing that sought to ban guns from bars in Burlington.

With the charter change languishing in a key House committee, Baruth told the chair of a key Senate committee, which was reviewing the election bill, to pump the brakes — months after the election bill had already cleared the House. Two weeks later, though, following legislators’ partial recess in early June, Senate leaders brought the bill onto the floor for a vote — a decision one House leader credited, at least in part, to VTDigger’s reporting on the political dealing behind the scenes.

Senators cut a number of measures from the bill as it passed in the House, including a study of using ranked-choice voting in Vermont for future presidential primaries. The slimmed-down bill included all the “must-have” provisions identified by the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office, a key backer of the legislation, according to Sen. Brian Collamore, R-Rutland, who chaired the Senate panel that reviewed the bill.

Here are the key measures that did make it into the 30-page law, which also sets out a new reporting requirement for certain write-in candidates and updates rules on who must report on donations to campaigns, among a number of other changes.

Campaign finance disclosures

The law eliminates a measure currently on the books stating that only candidates who raise or spend $500 or more have to file campaign finance disclosure forms with the Secretary of State’s Office. Those forms allow the public to review how much candidates have raised and from whom, and how much they’ve spent and on what.

Now, anyone running for office will have to file a disclosure form — regardless of how much they raise or spend. If that amount is less than $500, they’ll have to formally attest to the state that they haven’t surpassed that ceiling. If they raise or spend more than that, the state’s existing rules requiring more detailed disclosure filings would kick in.

Deputy Secretary of State Lauren Hibbert said her office regularly fields complaints from the public about candidates who, the complainants allege, have raised or spent more than $500 but haven’t disclosed any such information to the state. She said the office has little ability to track down potential scofflaws now, and hopes the new changes will create more accountability.

‘One bite’ candidacy

More controversial, though, was a portion of the law that now prevents a candidate who loses a primary election under the banner of one political party from running again in the general election under a different party label — or as an independent candidate.

The Secretary of State’s Office did not stake out a position for or against that change to restrict what’s often called “getting a second bite at the apple,” according to Hibbert. But while backers of the measure said it would make elections more fair, opponents said the changes were wrongly limiting the options voters could choose from on the ballot.

On the House floor earlier this month, independent and Progressive members spoke against the change, and it drew the most debate, by far, of any section of the bill. The measure does not do away with so-called “fusion” candidates, however, which are those who get an endorsement from multiple parties on the general election ballot.

Some senators were opposed to the “one bite” change, too.

“I don’t think it harms anyone to allow this,” said Washington County Sen. Andrew Perchlik, who’s a Democrat/Progressive, during debate about the bill on that chamber’s floor earlier this month, before it was passed. For prospective independent candidates, specifically, “I think it’s an anti-democratic change,” he added.

Write-in candidates

The new law also creates a requirement that write-in candidates for state and federal office in Vermont formally declare their candidacy with local or state officials. The change is designed to reduce the workload election officials have to take on, Hibbert said, especially when they’re tasked with tallying write-in votes that include what seem to be protest or joke votes for national figures or fictional characters.

In other cases, ballots will come in with numerous different spellings of a candidate’s name, she said. Hilary Francis, the Brattleboro town clerk, told legislators earlier this year about a case where it wasn’t completely clear what member of a family local write-in votes were referring to.

Under the new law, state and federal write-in candidates must tell either local clerks or the secretary of state about their intent to run by 5 p.m. on the Thursday before an election. When tallying up results, officials will then only count votes for candidates who met the deadline — with some exceptions, including for races in which a write-in candidate gets more votes than anyone whose name is listed on the ballot.

The goal is that officials will only have to count names of people who actually have a technical chance of getting elected to a given office, according to Hibbert.

The bill also includes several smaller changes to how local clerks operate elections, including allowing for additional time to address issues with a person’s ballot, a process known as “curing.”

‘Independent’ fundraisers

Another measure in the new law is meant to clarify that certain campaign finance rules apply to individuals who raise and spend money on behalf of a candidate, but who aren’t directly affiliated with that candidate. It wasn’t entirely clear in state law, according to Hibbert, that certain individual fundraisers had to follow as strict of filing guidelines as, for instance, larger political action committees, which are commonly called PACs.

Specifically, the law revises the definition of the term “independent expenditure-only political committee” to clarify that such a “committee” could include as little as one person.

Hibbert said the Secretary of State’s Office asked legislators to clarify the law after seeing Elon Musk, the billionaire and now-spurned adviser to President Donald Trump, hand out $1 million checks to Wisconsin voters in the leadup to an election for a seat on that state’s Supreme Court earlier this year. Musk was attempting to help elect a conservative judge to the court, though the candidate ultimately lost the race.

The law also lowered, from $1,000 to $500, the threshold at which these “independent expenditure-only” committees will have to report their activities to the state. The same lowered threshold will also apply to political parties and PACs operating in the state.

Hibbert said she thinks that threshold is still high enough to avoid sweeping in people who advocate, on a very small scale, for and against issues in their communities, such as a school budget. But larger local efforts, she said, warrant greater transparency.

“The goals here were just more consistency across the board,” Hibbert said.

Auditing voter rolls

Earlier this year, the House voted to affirm the victory of Rep. Jonathan Cooper, D-Pownal, in last fall’s contentious election in the Bennington-1 district, which includes the towns of Readsboro, Searsburg, Stamford, Woodford and a part of Pownal.

Roughly 50 people in the district received the wrong ballot in the election, and the race between Cooper and Republican Bruce Busa was decided by fewer than 30 votes, calling into question if the error influenced the result and how that should be handled.

In response to that election, legislators also added a measure into the election bill that requires local officials in places where House or Senate districts split municipal boundaries, such as in Bennington-1, to audit their voter rolls this year.

Local clerks will have to submit summaries of those audits to the Secretary of State’s Office by Nov. 15 — and the office itself must then develop a report on all those findings.

Open meeting law

Another measure in the legislation revises existing state law to “clarify,” according to Hibbert, that annual town meetings are not subject to the slate of requirements laid out in Vermont’s Open Meeting Law. While town meetings are open to all “legal voters” of a given place, Hibbert said, they aren’t — from a legal standpoint — open to the general public, which is where the distinction comes in.

She said the clarification stemmed from some concern over towns having to provide remote access to town meeting proceedings, including remote voting options. She said that if people had concerns about public access to a town meeting, they could take them to the Vermont Attorney General’s Office or the state’s Human Rights Commission.