Every Fax Counts : 3,000 Miles Fails to Keep Vermont Couple From Casting Ballots

Most people who find out about an election in their hometown 3,000 miles away three days before the balloting would just shrug and forget about exercising their democratic right. But Richard Barnaby, technologically minded businessman that he is, turned to his fax machine.

In another advance of the ever-expanding fax frontier, Barnaby had his Calais, Vt., town clerk fax two absentee ballots and envelopes to his Long Beach motel so that he and his wife could get their votes in the overnight mail in time for Tuesday’s special election for a school bond issue.

Turns out the Barnabys’ side lost--the Calais elementary school is not going to get a $1-million expansion. But in Calais, a village of about 1,000 people 40 miles from Burlington, the ballot faxing was “a little exciting.”

“It was like we were making history. It had never been done before,” said Chris Lynn, a friend and co-worker of Barnaby who drove Barnaby’s fax machine to the town clerk’s office for the transmission.

“In Calais, we don’t even have voting machines,” Lynn noted. “We’ve always used paper ballots and probably always will. Now we have paper ballots and fax ballots.”

The novel ballot delivery required the approval of Vermont Secretary of State Jim Douglas, who thinks that the interpretation of state laws should not lag behind technology. So long as the ballot was returned by mail in a sealed, signed envelope, Douglas said he saw nothing wrong with delivering the ballot by fax machine, which transmits and receives documents or drawings over telephone lines.

Vermont law says that absentee ballots may be requested until noon of the day before election.

The matter of faxing ballots had even come up before, although the Calais faxing was Vermont’s first. Some Burlington residents who are working in Fiji are thinking of having ballots faxed to them for March elections.

In California, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office said no ballot faxing is allowed.

“We don’t have the legal authority” to permit it, Melissa Warren said.

Barnaby is a computer specialist who calls Calais home but spends more than half the year in Long Beach consulting for oil trading companies.

“The life style in Vermont is wonderful, but the problem is, the work is terrible. Here the work is wonderful, and the life style is, well, not Vermont’s.”

By the time Barnaby learned of the election Friday, he either had to have the ballot flown out or faxed out.

“I’m willing to spend 10 bucks on the democratic process” to return a ballot by overnight mail, “but to spend 60 bucks to have it flown out. . . .”