Vermont

372,885 ballots divided by 522,600 registered voters is 71.35%, and the town-by-town report says so. The same ballots divided by a voting-age population of 528,077 is 70.6%, and the registration workbook says so. That workbook then carries OLD and NEW sheets that disagree about the voting-age population of overlapping years — 2016 at 505,921 and 503,828, giving 63.3% and 63.6% for the same election. Any figure lifted from one artifact and compared against another state, or against Vermont's own other artifact, is comparing different questions.

522,600 registered against 528,077 voting-age residents — 98.96%. Most of this corpus requires modelling that gap, sometimes at thirty points; here it is one. A pipeline that estimates eligible population from registration using a national ratio overstates Vermont's adult population, and one that treats unregistered adults as an addressable universe is describing about five thousand people statewide.

The Vermont Constitution requires a majority for lieutenant governor. In 2024 no candidate reached one, so the election was resolved by the Joint Canvassing Committee in January 2025 — months after the count, by a body the results file does not mention. The vote totals still show a leader. Anything that reads the highest total as the winner records the wrong outcome for a statewide constitutional office, and the signal that it did so exists only in a prose note beside the results.

Early and absentee voting was 26.0% of ballots in 2018, 75.6% in 2020 and 63.69% in 2024, because Vermont began mailing a ballot to every registered voter for the general election. The town range runs from 14.4% in Pownal to 97.6% in Colchester. Any contact model, turnout model or election-day operations plan calibrated on pre-2020 Vermont is describing a minority of the electorate, and a state-level average hides a jurisdiction-level spread of over eighty points.

In the state's own 2024 turnout report, Washington town shows 656 absentee votes against 654 total votes cast, and Windham shows 289 against 288 — impossibilities, off by two and one. At the district-row level Colchester's Chittenden row shows 5,757 absentee against 4,200 cast, or 137%. The statewide totals nevertheless reconcile exactly, so the errors are local and do not propagate. A validator that rejects the file on the impossibility loses a good statewide artifact; one that ignores it propagates a negative in-person count.

The turnout file has 282 rows for 247 towns, because 24 towns appear more than once — once per House district they fall in. Burlington appears six times, South Burlington five, Rutland City four. A town's registration and turnout exist only as a sum across its rows, and reading one row per town gives a partial figure for the state's largest municipalities. Compounding it, the PDF wraps long names across lines, so South Burlington's five rows carry the town name as SOUTH with BURLINGTON on the following line.

The Census counts 277 subcounty governments in Vermont: 237 towns, 10 cities and 30 incorporated villages. The villages are inside towns, they are separate general-purpose governments, and they do not appear in the voter file at all — Vermont's 247 voting units are the towns and cities only. Connecticut sets the same trap with ten boroughs. A count of local governments and a count of election jurisdictions differ by thirty here, and both are correct.

Vermont administers 14 counties and the Census counts 14 county governments. In this family that puts it with Maine and New Hampshire at the conservative end, against Connecticut and Rhode Island at zero and Massachusetts at 5 of 14. A New England pipeline written against Connecticut assumes there is no county tier to join to; in Vermont there is, and it is intact. Regional assumptions are wrong in both directions inside a six-state region.