Primary day is August 11 in Vermont this year. But why that day, deep in vacation season, when Vermonters might prefer to be at the beach or in the mountains rather than at the polls? Like all good stories, this one has some plot twists. For decades, Vermont held its primaries on the second Tues day of September. That date ensured the elections took place after Labor Day; children were back in school, and Vermonters had returned to work after their summer holidays. Then in 2009, Congress passed the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, which strengthened voting rights for Americans living abroad. The law requires states to send absentee ballots to soldiers and other citizens at least 45 days before a federal election. Since primaries determine who gets on a ballot, holding them in September left little time to print and mail general election ballots. That motivated state legislators to propose moving the primary to the fourth Tuesday in August. They drafted a bill, S.117, during the 2010 session.  Then-governor Jim Douglas was against it. Primaries, in which candidates compete for their party’s line on the general election ballot, tend to draw fewer voters than the November general elections. He argued that scheduling primaries in peak vacation time would drive down voter participation even further. Douglas, a Republican, had announced in 2009 that he wouldn’t run for reelection in 2010. He supported then-lieutenant governor Brian Dubie, also a Republican, to succeed him. Democrats, in the meantime, anticipated a hard-fought primary campaign to determine their nominee. That, Douglas asserted, was their real motivation for moving up the vote: The Dems, he said, wanted to have more time between the primary and the general election to build support for their nominee. “To be perfectly blunt, there’s a political interest on the part of Democrats to have a longer general election campaign period, to get beyond what may be a fractious primary and try to unify their voter base,” Douglas told the Brattleboro Reformer in 2010. Then-secretary of state Deb Markowitz, one of five Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls that year, disagreed. “I ask that the governor not play politics with the rights of our military men and women to vote,” she told the Brattleboro Reformer. The legislation passed with broad bipartisan support in both the Senate and the House. Douglas reluctantly allowed it to become law without his signature. Gov. Jim Douglas in 2011 Credit: File: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur “In the guise of assuring that the votes of our brave men and women in the military are counted, as of course they should be, the Legislature has passed S.117, which in all likelihood will discourage voter participation,” Douglas wrote in a 2010 letter to the legislature. The open gubernatorial seat that year attracted heavy-hitter Democratic candidates: Markowitz; Peter Shumlin, president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate; former lieutenant governor Doug Racine; then-state senator Susan Bartlett; and Matt Dunne, a former state senator. Shumlin won, besting Racine by a margin of only 197 votes. Shumlin went on to narrowly beat Dubie, Douglas’ preferred successor, by slightly more than 4,000 votes in November.  The new late-August primary date was short-lived. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Vermont after towns failed to send more than 20 percent of requested absentee ballots to citizens abroad within the required time frame. In a January 2014 letter to then-secretary of state Jim Condos, the DOJ blamed the failure on delays caused by a recount in a single statewide primary race two years earlier. Progressive gubernatorial candidate Martha Abbott had beaten write-in candidate Annette Smith in a close contest, and the latter asked for a new tally. That left the Secretary of State’s Office without enough time to prepare and distribute general election ballots by the federal deadline. The letter arrived at an opportune time. Vermont’s legislature was already considering moving the primary date to earlier in August. The DOJ told Condos it would be willing to drop the lawsuit should the state reform its primaries. Doug Racine at a hearing in 2008 Credit: File: Jjeb Wallace-Brodeur “As introduced in the Senate, the bill contained a change in the state’s primary date to the first Tuesday in August in each even-numbered year,” the DOJ informed Condos. “Although that change was deleted from the final version passed by the Senate, we understand that it may be added back during the House’s consideration of the bill.”  The House did, indeed, reverse the Senate and designated the first Tuesday of August as the new date. A conference committee of House members and senators reached a compromise, agreeing to move the date earlier than the last week of August but later than the first week of that month, starting in 2016. Then-governor Shumlin signed S.86 into law. And that’s how the second Tuesday in August came to be Vermont’s primary day. More than a decade later, Douglas has not changed his position. He said that while it’s important that Vermonters serving abroad can vote, holding primaries earlier has altered Vermont’s political culture. It forces candidates to declare sooner, which lengthens the campaign season — and distracts lawmakers from governing. “Party people like the change because they can get their nominees sooner, and if there’s a divisive primary contest it’s over earlier, so they can focus on the general election,” he said. “But I think it disadvantages candidates who aren’t real hardcore party people.” Doug Racine hasn’t budged, either. In a recent interview, he said moving the primary dates from the original “very late” September schedule had been a welcome move — and a fair one.  “I don’t think there was any partisan advantage involved one way or the other,” he said. Racine said holding the primaries earlier in the year has benefited Vermont. The mid-August date has given the state more time to prepare for elections and distribute ballots, especially as more Vermonters request mail-in ballots and vote early. ➆ The original print version of this article was headlined “A Date With Destiny | Primary day in Vermont is the second Tuesday in August, but that wasn’t always so. Here’s how it came to be.” The post Why is August 11, 2026 Primary Day in Vermont? Here’s How That Happened. appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less