Final Reading: A sweeping election bill gets new life in the Vermont Senate

The House and Senate both passed a slimmed-down version of a bill that would make myriad changes to the state’s election procedures Monday — even after the legislation, in a different form, seemed unlikely to advance when legislators last convened in full at the end of May.

Election-related bills are often contentious — “because nobody loves to debate elections more than elected officials,” said Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, on the Senate floor just before the chamber approved the bill, H.474, Monday morning. Later in the day, the House passed the legislation, too, sending it to Gov. Phil Scott for his consideration.

That outcome was far from certain, though, after Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, tied the bill’s fate in the Senate to an unrelated Burlington charter change proposal he was sponsoring. (The election bill had cleared the House in March.) Baruth told Rutland Republican Sen. Brian Collamore, who chairs the Senate committee that was reviewing the election bill, not to advance it to the floor unless the charter change advanced out of a House committee.

Fast forward two weeks, and the charter change, which would ban guns from bars and other establishments in the city that serve alcohol, hasn’t moved — but the election bill has.



https://vtdigger.org/2025/06/16/final-reading-a-sweeping-election-bill-gets-new-life-in-the-vermont-senate/