Gov. Phil Scott and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas announce that 900 people who were wrongly registered to vote have been cut from Vermont’s voter rolls on Tuesday. Photo by Shaun Robinson/VTDigger MONTPELIER — Vermont officials have removed just shy of 900 people from the state’ s voter rolls who they said were wrongly registered to vote due to human error at the state Department of Motor Vehicles. None of those 900 people actually cast a ballot and the state wrongly registered them at various points over the past 25 years, Gov. Phil Scott and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas said at a press conference Tuesday. Some of those people were likely ineligible to vote, possibly because they aren’t U.S. citizens; Copeland Hanzas said she could not provide a breakdown of how many were eligible voters.  The announcement came a day after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling put fresh focus on President Donald Trump’s attempts to curtail mail-in voting nationwide ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. In Vermont, everyone who is registered to vote — which until Monday included those 900 people — gets mailed a ballot for general elections.  The justices overturned a lower court ruling that blocked an executive order Trump signed in March attempting to create federally-managed lists of eligible voters and order the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people who are on those lists.  Monday’s ruling did not decide whether Trump’s order is legal, only finding that the states who challenged it, which include Vermont, lacked the legal right to do so. The order hasn’t taken effect and additional hurdles remain that could make it challenging to implement. Scott and Copeland Hanzas said they wanted to be upfront about the state’s error to show they’re trying to make Vermont’s voter rolls as accurate as possible before the state mails out general election ballots next month. Both of them said they were strong supporters of voting by mail and criticized the White House’s efforts to undermine the practice.   Scott, a Republican, also called the Supreme Court’s ruling “misguided.”  “The federal government has no business encroaching on the states on how we administer free and fair elections,” he said. “Mail-in ballots work well in Vermont, and I remain committed to defending our system from federal overreach.” How did the error happen? The error stemmed from the process by which voter registration data is shared between the DMV and the Secretary of State’s Office. Under a 2016 state law, eligible voters who use a DMV service — such as renewing their driver’s license — are automatically registered to vote unless they tell the DMV they do not want to be registered.  Before that, people could still register to vote at the DMV but they had to opt-in, rather than opt-out. The 900 people in question chose not to get registered, prior to the 2016 law or after the process became automatic. But DMV staff sent their information to the Secretary of State to register them, anyway, said Andrew Collier, the department’s commissioner. Copeland Hanzas, a Democrat, said most of the errors occurred over the course of several years after the law took effect. Some happened even more recently when the DMV transferred data into a new information technology system. Far more people have elected not to be registered to vote at the DMV over the past 25 years, Copeland Hanzas said. She estimated 20,000 had declined to do so since the process became automatic. But of all those people, officials found only about 900 who never made an effort to register to vote elsewhere, such as by visiting their local clerk’s office. The goal, Copeland Hanzas told reporters, was to purge names of people who had shown no desire to register at any point. State officials used an artificial intelligence tool to help determine which people to remove, Denise Reilly-Hughes, secretary of the state Agency of Digital Services, said at the press conference.  The error was first brought to the Secretary of State’s attention last winter by “a regular Vermonter” who said they were registered to vote despite intending not to be. Copeland Hanzas’ office did not immediately take action based on the complaint. But an announcement last month by officials in New Jersey that thousands of non-citizens there were wrongly registered to vote because of a software glitch in the state Motor Vehicle Commission’s voter registration system prompted Copeland Hanzas to take a deeper look, she said. Vermont does not use the same system as New Jersey, she said. “When the New Jersey news hit, I said, ‘Now is the time,’” she told reporters. “I wanted to be sure that we could say with a straight face that we did everything we could.” Collier said Vermont’s DMV has since taken steps to prevent data from being shared incorrectly between the two agencies in the future. The department bolstered its quality checks and increased the amount of training its staff receives, he said.  “This is not a one-time fix,” Collier told reporters. “We will continue monitoring, auditing and improving to ensure voter intent is respected — and the data we transmit is reliable.” Read the story on VTDigger here: As Trump tries to curtail mail-in voting, Vermont officials clean up errors on state voter rolls. ...read more read less