Tim Ashe and Ivar Kronick are running for Vermont State Auditor

October 6, 2026  |  By Keith Whitcomb Jr.  | The Times Argus

State Auditor Doug Hoffer has been in office for the past 14 years. He’s not running again, and his two potential replacements have different ideas on where to take the job after one of them is elected in November.

Democrat Tim Ashe and Republican Ivar Kronick are the two names on the ballot for Hoffer’s seat.

Tim Ashe

Tim Ashe, Democratic candidate for state auditor. Courtesy photo

Ashe has spent the past five years serving as Hoffer’s deputy. He’d previously been president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate. He was first elected to the Senate in 2009, representing Chittenden County.

“To me, the auditor, it’s really the one role in state government tasked with ensuring that voters are getting what they paid for from state government, and in assessing that, not caring what the political party thinks, not fearing that the governor will be mad, that the legislature will be mad, but just following the facts where they go,” said Ashe. “That makes it an interesting job to have for anyone.”

Ashe said many people have lost confidence in the federal government’s ability to solve problems, and this is also happening with the state government, with education taxes, healthcare, and housing costs all increasing. He said he’d like to make it a priority to restore some of the people’s faith in their state government by finding out what’s working, what isn’t, and telling people about it.

Ashe said his experience within the auditor’s office as well as his tenure in state government make him well-suited to the state auditor role.

He noted his past experience as an affordable housing developer with Cathedral Square, and his current role as president of the Board of Directors of the Community Health Centers of Burlington as experience that would help him be an effective state auditor.

Ashe said he wants to make the auditor’s work more visible and understandable to the public, and that includes when audits show things are working well.

“For me, the auditor can’t be a lobbyist. It’s not someone who should be spending all their time in the State House trying to get attention, or appear to be trying to make policy decisions,” he said.

Often, he said, an audit will turn up a problem with a state agency and the agency happily works to correct it. When this doesn’t happen, the information is sent to lawmakers or someone with decision-making authority.

Ashe said that if elected he plans to make himself more visible around the state by going into communities to hear what people are saying. He said he plans to do this with regard to specific issues and areas of interest, like healthcare or education. He said that when he was president pro tem of the Senate, he had Senate committees occasionally hold meetings outside of Montpelier, and senators routinely reported hearing information they otherwise would not have.

He said his three priorities for the auditor’s office would be healthcare prices and access, the value of housing programs, and support for rural communities.

Ashe said people want to see if the programs the state spends their money on are actually working, and that he’d communicate the results of audits on these programs more actively than what’s currently being done. He also plans to conduct larger audits to see if there have been overpayments or payments made in error.

Ivar Kronick

Ivar Kronick, Republican candidate for state auditor. Courtesy photo

Kronick said he was born in Norway, but grew up outside of Philadelphia. He said he went to Williams College in Massachusetts and although he was good at math he decided to pursue a career in fine art, at least initially. He lived in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, for many years before moving to Poultney, Vermont. He currently works for Dometic UK Blind Systems LTD. He said he’s not an auditor by trade but has decades of experience working in highly audited environments.

He said everything is becoming less affordable, and that as state auditor he’d apply more scrutiny toward government spending. He said Vermont’s state budget is out of proportion to its population.

“There’s something going on that needs attention,” he said.

He said the current auditor’s office is focused on performance audits. Kronick said he would move away from these and instead focus on audits aimed at looking for waste, fraud, and abuse.

“I would go into the big areas of spending,” he said, namely Medicaid, education, highway and transit, and the state pension fund.

“Those would be the first things I would like to see happen, and I feel they have not been audited so they’re overdue,” he said.

Kronick said he will make information the auditor’s office produces more accessible to people by making the results of audits and recommendations independently searchable. People could look up a list of recommendations issued, rather than having people find those within specific audit reports.

The general election is Nov. 3.