VTGOP Chairman Paul Dame made the following statement after The Vermont House voted 91-42 to finalize the results of the contested Bennington-1 race.

”It was greatly disappointing to see voters be told that they have to vote for Democrats to save Democracy - and then for the Democratic majority to be the ones to knowingly ignore voters. Democrats failed to act to correct the injustice delivered to voters in Pownal. How are we supposed to convince voters that every vote matters when House Democrats justified their inaction by saying if a situation is too complicated or too inconvenient then ignoring voters is justified.”

“Most disappointing of all were the actions of Representative Cooper, who represents the district in question. Knowing that the Democrats likely had enough votes to adopt the report without him, I was expecting him to err on the side of giving his voters their say. But when asked to vote on the issue he did not demonstrate enough courage to vote one way or the other. Either he didn’t have confidence that the work of the committee was strong enough for his support, or he didn’t want to go against his party and give his own constituents the right to decide for themselves.”

“This action by the Democrats has set a dangerous precedent. It is an undisputed fact that an error occured in an election, and that the error was large enough to potentially change the outcome of the election. If a rememdy isn’t offerred in this case - what will the circumstances have to be in order to fix an error? In this case it was an honest oversight missed by many different people - but if future errors are committed (intentionally or accidentally) voters have no confidence that Democrats will take any other errors seriously - especially if the outcome benefits Democrats as it did here.

Republicans voted overwhelmingly against the decision by Democrats to sweep the issue under the rug and move on because we believe that every vote matters. As Rep. Casey Toof (R-St. Albans Town) said so simply and clearly during debate, ”Some people were left out of this election decision, and that’s not ok.”

I hope that the voters of Bennington County are watching closely to see how little regard many House Democrats have to addressing known errors in their elections because doing so is too complicated or inconvenient.

The next question is whether House Democrats will work with Republicans to create bi-partisan policy that can give Vermont voters confidence that future errors are reduced, or will they just wait until the next error is decided by the House and hope they are still in control? Even more importantly, will they establish a predictible and non-partisan way to remedy errors in the future instead of relying on a body that lies under the control and persuasion of partisan politicians? Or will that also be too complicated and inconvenient as well?“