Vermont GOP stalls lawsuit threat against new Winooski, Montpelier voting laws
Written by Jackson Moffett and Grace Decker
Voting booth
Vermont GOP chair Deb Billado announced during a party meeting in early July that the Vermont GOP will take legal action over charter changes in Winooski and Montpelier allowing all residents to vote in municipal elections.
“We believe that it goes directly against the Vermont State Constitution section 42 and we are moving forward with legal action,” Billado said, according to a report from True North Reports.
Now, Billado and GOP leadership offer no details on when and if a lawsuit will be filed, and say options are still being explored. Vermont law school professor Peter Teachout said it’s highly unlikely that a lawsuit would be successful.
Noncitizen voting has long faced Republican opposition, with Republicans in the state House opposing the legislature's approval of these ballot measures.
The bill, H. 227, passed the House 99-44 and passed the Senate 20-10, with a majority of the bill’s nay votes coming from Republicans. After the bill was passed, it was vetoed by Governor Phil Scott.
Supermajorities in the state House and Senate then overrode Scott’s veto, enacting the charter changes.
Which leads to the July 10 Republican party meeting where Billado announced that there will be a lawsuit filed over the noncitizen voting measures.
However, GOP leaders say they are either in the dark, or are cagey with any details about the potential lawsuit.
“I do know the statement was made, but I can't tell you that I have any more information than that,” said Rep. Rob LaClair, R-Barre Town, who is also assistant minority leader in the House.
Janet Metz, the chairwoman for the Chittenden County GOP, said that she was not the person to contact regarding the lawsuit, and said to contact Billado, and the attorney filing the action, Deborah Bucknam, the party vice-chair and a 2016 candidate for Vermont attorney general.
Bucknam said via email she wasn’t aware of any of the details, and isn’t involved.
Billado said the party is exploring options, and offered few details.
“The GOP is exploring all options regarding non citizen voting in Vermont. No details available at this point,” Billado said in an August 6 email.
In a later email, Billado said that “It’s an internal effort from my office that we are not discussing until we have chosen our path,” when asked if there are more concrete plans for the future of the lawsuit.
If the Vermont GOP does decide to file a lawsuit, they will face an uphill battle in the courts, according to Vermont Law School Professor Peter Teachout.
Court precedent has allowed for the legislature to give towns the ability to enfranchise all residents, Teachout said.
“The Vermont Supreme Court has not ruled on this issue in the last 50 to 100 years. There’s a case from the 18th century and a bunch of cases from the 19th century where the court has upheld [the legislature's ability to allow towns to permit noncitizen voting],” Teachout said.
Teachout emphasized that it’s possible the current Vermont Supreme Court could agree with the Vermont GOP and that a lawsuit may have grounds, but it’s not likely.
“It is highly, highly unlikely that the Vermont Supreme Court would do so since you have this solid, unbroken line of cases that establish the legislature has the authority to allow non-US citizens to vote,” Teachout said.
Another argument the newsletter and LaClair makes is that, due to the nature of the Vermont school board system, noncitizen voting could result in a state-wide shift in school funding due to the Vermont Education fund pooling resources and allocating them among most Vermont School districts.
However, such an argument was addressed earlier in the spring to the Vermont House Republicans, as stated by Rep. Lawrence Cupoli, R-Rutland, at a March 30 Republican Caucus meeting.
“It does have a very very small effect on the [education] fund, but we’re being told it's negligible,” Cupoli said. “ But I think, looking at the future, is this something that perhaps could happen in the city of Burlington, or the city of Battleboro, and would continue to flare up as we move forward?”
There has also been an argument expressed against the bill including giving noncitizens the ability to become elected officials in towns and school boards themselves.
“It’s my understanding that these folks, if they're given the opportunity to vote, then they can also hold public office,” said LaClair, “There was a charter change in Battleboro about giving 16 year olds the right to vote, and if they’re given the right to vote then they can hold public office.”
Teachout said that he believed it would be possible for a noncitizen to be elected to a municipal or school board office, and cited a court case from the 19th century affirming that a noncitizen could be a tax collector.
Winooski city officials, including Deputy Mayor Hal Colston, who also serves in the state House, said that he sees the GOP’s potential legal action as a fundamental misunderstanding of this constitutionality, and sees the GOP’s opposition to the charter changes in favor of a “one-size fits policy which is antithetical to our whole notion of local control."
“There has never been an issue of constitutionality, and that's where people who aren't understanding of how our state constitution works, get caught up in that issue because they fall back to this thing about ‘you have to be a citizen in order to vote’. And that's not true, in local elections,” Colston said.
