Vermonters are responding in large numbers to the opportunity to cast their votes before Election Day via universal mail-in balloting. According to the Secretary of State’s office, town and city clerks have received, and accepted for processing, a total of 125,904 ballots as of the latest count, issued this (Thursday) morning. (Another 18,088 ballots have been returned by voters but not yet officially accepted. It’s a thing.)

Which means, for one, that candidates spending money between now and Election Day are already too late to influence approximately one-third of the electorate. Something to bear in mind for future campaigns. Universal mailed ballots are here to stay, and more and more people will get familiar with the slightly discomfiting process. (Okay, the ballot goes in this envelope, which then gets stuffed in this other envelope, and then I sign that envelope, and somehow the whole process identifies me as the voter but not who I voted for. I think.)

But the main point for my purposes is that one hell of a lot of Vermonters have already participated, and all signs point to a record high vote total. Indeed, the old record might be completely obliterated.

The current standard of 370,968 was set in 2020, which featured a high-stakes presidential election and the debut of universal mail-in balloting — one of the few nice things we got out of the pandemic. Well, we are already one-third of the way to matching that turnout record.

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