Secretary of State Jim Condos
The Vermont Secretary of State’s office was declared to have “won the internet” by numerous Twitter users this week.
Secretary of State James Condos said he did not write — but did approve of — the post from his office’s official Twitter account that went viral Wednesday, and resisted characterizations of it as mocking President Donald Trump, saying instead he was using humor to make a point about voting rights that he has been making for years.
Trump was advocating for a voter identification law during a rally in Florida on Wednesday when he said “You know, if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID.”
White House Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders later claimed that the president was referring to being carded in order to buy alcohol. Regardless of what the president may or may not have meant, what he actually said drew a round of online mockery, and a tweet from the official Vermont Secretary of State account.
“We’re strongly opposed to Shopper ID laws,” the tweet read. “There has been no evidence that grocery fraud occurs on a widespread basis, and restrictive Shopper ID laws only serve to prevent eligible shoppers from buying their groceries on shopping day.”
By late Thursday afternoon, it had more than 35,000 “likes” and had been retweeted almost 12,000 times.
It had been preceded by a reminder that early voting was underway for the Aug. 14 primary and most of the account’s output for the rest of the day concerned cybersecurity for voting systems. Condos said he was surprised by all the attention is was getting.
“It goes to show you that in this day and age of social media, you never know what’s going on,” Condos said. “We’ve written other tweets that were funnier of more pertinent.”
Condos said he leaves the actual writing of tweets to his chief of staff, Eric Covey, and to Deputy Secretary of State Chris Winters.
“We work as a team,” he said. “They run things by me before they post it.”
He said they discussed the “Shopper ID” tweet for maybe 10 to 15 minutes.
“It was done tongue-in-cheek, but it was also done to further an issue I think it important,” he said. “Voters have rights. Voting rights are important. Eligible Americans, every one of them, should not have obstacles in their way to casting a ballot.”
Voter ID laws, Condos said, put an obstacle in front of voters to solve a problem that is virtually non-existent.
“There is zero evidence that voter identity fraud occurs on a widespread basis,” he said. “There are occasionals, but on a widespread basis it just doesn’t happen.”
Condos said a Loyola University study looked at 1 billion ballots cast in the U.S. since 2000 and found only 31 possible instances of fraud. He also noted that turnout in Vermont for the 2016 general election was 68 percent.
“I have a hard enough time getting people to vote once, let alone getting them to vote twice,” he said.
Condos also said that the people most likely to be affected by voter ID laws were seniors, young adults, lower-income voters and minorities.
“These are vulnerable groups that should not be impacted,” he said.
Condos is facing a re-election challenge from Republican H. Brooke Paige, who is also running for state treasurer, auditor of accounts and attorney general. Paige accused Condos of not taking the integrity of elections seriously, both in the tweet and in his office’s policies.
“Allowing the state to have extremely loose election laws … is probably typified by his lighthearted treatment of President Trump’s errant message,” Paige said.
Paige said that while an audit of Vermont’s elections conducted a few years ago found little to no voter fraud, it did find issues with the maintenance of voter rolls. He also said the actual instance of voter fraud was not as important as confidence in the system.
“There are a lot of people who do not believe our voting system has integrity regardless of what the facts are,” he said.
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