Three running for Vt. Secretary of State

October 16, 2026 | By Keith Whitcomb Jr.  | The Times Argus

This story was first published by The Times Argus on Oct. 2.

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Democratic incumbent Sarah Copeland Hanzas, perennial candidate and Republican H. Brooke Paige, and Progressive candidate Rachel Shaw are running for Secretary of State.

Sarah Copeland Hanzas

Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a Democrat, is seeking a third term. File photo

Copeland Hanzas took office in 2023. She was a State House representative for many years prior, having been the House majority leader at one point.

“I’m really proud of some of the improvements we’ve made in the office over the first four years,” she said.

Copeland Hanzas said she oversaw the replacement of several major information technology systems, business registrations, campaign filings, and election management.

“We’ve heard a lot of really good feedback from town and city clerks about the usability of the system,” she said.

Her office also modernized a program for people fleeing domestic violence or human trafficking situations that keeps their physical addresses confidential.

Copeland Hanzas said she’ll keep working to protect Vermonters’ voting rights. She said those rights are under attack by the Trump administration, and while some issues, like federal gerrymandering, don’t impact a small state like Vermont, others do.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do with our town and city clerks to understand the best way that we can craft a voting rights act that will do things like make sure ballots are translated for people for whom English is not their native language,” she said. “We want to make sure that disability access, the ability to vote your choices privately regardless of what kind of disability you have, continues to be protected in state law as it had been in federal law.”

She said she would like to see further expansion of the ability to vote by mail. She said it’s expensive for local governments to do this with town and special elections. She said town-level elections are some of the most important, but turnout is among the lowest.

Copeland Hanzas said she’s been working with regional representatives from the United States Postal Service to make sure voting by mail works as it is supposed to.

She said that if she’s reelected she’ll work on developing a system where people can track the legislative rule-making process. The laws that get passed are the framework, she said, while how they actually function is another process entirely that’s not well known.

H. Brooke Paige

Republican candidate H. Brooke Paige is running for secretary of state for the fifth time. Courtesy photo

Paige said this is his fifth time running for secretary of state.

“There’s a lot of problems in that office,” he said.

Paige said the secretary of state is not the chief elections officer, and that’s a role held by local boards of civil authority.

He said he agreed with the changes made to voting rules during the pandemic.

“Once the emergency had ended, we should have immediately returned to the elections being conducted consistent with the constitution,” he said.

Paige said he’s not opposed to absentee voting, but the current practices need to end. He said he doesn’t want to see an “election season” where people cast ballots weeks before election day and can’t change their minds if new information comes to light.

“And certainly having multi-day periods where you can vote by mail, especially universal vote by mail where we’re sending ballots out across the countryside to anyone and everyone who can get their hands on one, vote harvesting which compounds that problem.”

He said there’s less opportunity for people to observe elections when many votes are cast through the mail.

“We have a lot of problems and whether there’s a huge amount of fraud or not, no one knows. I don’t think it’s that severe, but the secretary of state’s office has neither the authority nor the resources to really investigate anything,” he said.

He said the election audits that happen now aren’t adequate.

“Many people have made the conscious decision not to get involved in the election process anymore because they don’t believe that something isn’t up,” he said.

Besides elections, he said the Office of Professional Regulation is overseeing too many professions too inefficiently. He said some jobs should be overseen by the Department of Health or the Department of Justice.

Paige said Vermont also needs to either preserve historical records better or make them easier to access by digitizing them.

The general election is Nov. 3.