Vermont ranks among the top states in the country for voter turnout when November rolls around. In 2024, 71% of eligible voters showed up to cast ballots in national elections. That number, impressive by any national measure, tells only half the story. Come March, those same Vermonters largely stay home.
John Bossange, a Burlington resident, raised this contradiction recently in a commentary that cuts to the heart of local democratic participation. His argument is simple and pointed: the issues decided at town meeting affect Vermonters’ daily lives more directly than most federal elections, yet the people with the most at stake routinely skip the vote.
The numbers back him up. According to the Vermont Secretary of State’s 2025 annual meeting turnout statistics, participation across the state rarely climbs above 20%. In smaller villages using traditional floor votes, turnout drops to somewhere between 3% and 10% of eligible voters. Communities that adopted the Australian ballot system or mailed ballots directly to residents before March 3 saw roughly double the participation of those relying on the traditional town meeting format. East Montpelier, which mailed ballots to all residents ahead of this year’s meeting, reached more than 40% turnout. South Burlington recorded 23.03%, and Burlington came in at approximately 30.29% by unofficial count.
Those figures represent the high end. Most Vermont towns fell well below them.
The cultural contradiction here is worth sitting with. Vermont has a genuine civic tradition. Residents debate property taxes, school budgets, housing bonds, and infrastructure projects with real passion. Local races for select board, school board, and mayor generate genuine engagement in community conversations. Yet when the moment arrives to convert that passion into an actual vote, roughly four out of five eligible voters decline to participate.
Bossange points out what is at stake when turnout collapses at this level. Local elections determine how tax dollars are spent, how burdens are distributed across a community, and how prepared the next generation of Vermont children will be for their futures. Law enforcement priorities, traffic patterns, housing development, conservation of open land, parks, recreational infrastructure: all of these come down to decisions made at the local level, often by a narrow slice of the eligible electorate.
The format of the meeting itself appears to influence whether people bother. The data consistently shows that removing friction from the voting process brings more people in. Mailed ballots and extended voting windows nearly double turnout compared to the traditional model that requires physical attendance at a specific time and place. That is not a small difference, and it raises a practical question: if expanding access demonstrably increases participation, why are more Vermont communities not moving in that direction?
At the same time, format alone cannot explain a gap this wide. Something else is happening culturally when 71% of people vote in November and fewer than 20% vote in March. Part of it is visibility. National elections arrive with months of media saturation, social pressure, and mobilization infrastructure. Local town meetings get a notice in the community newsletter and maybe a yard sign or two. The asymmetry in attention reflects and reinforces the asymmetry in turnout.
The irony is sharp. Federal policy shapes broad conditions. Local policy shapes the texture of everyday life: the condition of roads, the quality of schools, the presence of green space, the safety of neighborhoods. One level of government gets the crowds. The other gets the scraps.
Bossange’s framing makes the civic stakes explicit without dressing them up. If you do not vote, someone else’s vote decides the rules your family lives under. That is not an abstraction. In towns where 5% of eligible voters determine a school budget, the math makes the stakes concrete.
Vermont’s March turnout problem will not solve itself. It requires communities to examine both structural barriers to participation and the cultural habits that let local democracy run on near-empty. The state’s November performance shows the appetite for civic engagement exists. What March reveals is how much of that appetite goes unfed when the stakes feel smaller but the consequences land closer to home.
