MONTPELIER — An audit of local voter rolls prompted by the error-plagued race for a Vermont House seat in Bennington County last year uncovered 100 more cases across the state in which people had been assigned to vote in the wrong legislative district. As a result, the Vermont Secretary of Sta te’s Office, which conducted the review, is calling for additional checks of town-managed voter rolls each time the state conducts the decennial process of redrawing legislative districts after the U.S. census count. The number of Vermont voters assigned to the wrong district is low relative to the total number of people — about 373,000 — who cast a ballot in the most recent election. Officials from the secretary’s office said Friday they were not aware of any instances in which the results of a recent election would have changed because of voters who were in the wrong district. READ MORE The review was required by a law passed earlier this year and was published Nov. 20. It had all 24 Vermont cities and towns that span more than one district, for the Vermont House or Senate, review the checklists that prescribe who in town votes in which district. Most Vermont municipalities are part of just one legislative district, meaning every voter there chooses from the same slate of state representatives and senators. But in the two dozen others, municipal and legislative district lines do not align so neatly. That means which candidates a resident sees on their ballot depends on where their house is. That’s the case in the Bennington County town of Pownal, where some 50 voters were found shortly after the 2024 election to have been assigned to the wrong House district. The error stemmed from how a single street in town had been divided, during redistricting in 2022, between the Bennington-1 and Bennington-5 House districts. Democrat Jonathan Cooper won the race in Bennington-1 over Republican Bruce Busa by fewer than 30 votes, calling into question if the error influenced the result and how the discrepancies should be handled. The full House later voted to affirm Cooper’s win, though several months after, it also passed the law requiring voter rolls to be audited. The errors on Pownal’s voter rolls were corrected following the 2024 election. The 100 people identified in the latest report were in addition to those, the Secretary of State’s Office said. All of the newfound discrepancies have also since been corrected. According to the audit, three other municipalities made “minor errors” putting the 2022 district maps into effect. In Burlington, the state’s largest city, 26 out of about 29,200 total voters had to be moved to another House district, the review found. Meanwhile, Colchester and Williamstown had to move five and one voters, respectively. The audit also found “data integrity issues” related to voters’ records that were either formatted incorrectly or included incomplete information. For instance, a voter may have listed their apartment number on a line meant for the number of their street address, meaning they were assigned to a voting district on the wrong side of the street.  As a result of those data issues — many of which predated even the latest decennial redistricting process — 68 more voters across 12 different municipalities had to be moved into a different district after the audit, according to the secretary’s office. In all, that meant more than half of the towns in the state that encompass multiple districts needed to move at least one voter as a result of the audit. Lauren Hibbert, Vermont’s deputy secretary of state, said inaccuracies on voter rolls are unavoidable and that the office was expecting to find a small number of them. She said the results of the audit should not make people feel less confident in the integrity of the state’s elections because many of the errors were a result of data being entered incorrectly, almost certainly by accident. She also characterized the findings as an example of the joint oversight of elections between local and state officials working as it should. “I think Vermonters can feel very comfortable that their town clerk is aware who is on their voter checklist. And, when you take that across all of our towns, that the statewide voter checklist is very well maintained,” Hibbert said in an interview. She added that the office’s relatively new election management system, which it rolled out earlier this year, has safeguards that would likely flag similar errors in voter data entry going forward. The system also makes it easier for the office to run reports looking for errors in its statewide database that includes all voters, Hibbert said. Vermont’s election data, and similar data in other states, has come into the crosshairs in recent months due to efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to collect details on voters across the country. The White House has indicated that it wants the data to crack down on fraudulent voting and identify instances, which data shows are rare, of non-U.S. citizens voting in state or federal elections. The Vermont Secretary of State’s Office denied a request in August from Trump’s Department of Justice to hand over voter data. On Monday, the Trump administration sued Vermont to force the state to comply. Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott said at a press conference Wednesday that he supported Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas’ decision to withhold the data, which could include voters’ dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. The secretary’s office had no additional information on the lawsuit as of Friday, Hibbert said. Read the story on VTDigger here: Audit finds more Vermont voters assigned to wrong state House, Senate districts . ...read more read less