While much of the country's election reform legislation has been rife with partisanship, Vermont is bucking that trend.
Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed into law on Monday a measure that will automatically send Vermont's 495,000 registered voters a mail-in ballot ahead of statewide general elections. The General Assembly approved the legislation on a bipartisan basis last month.
Vermont's collaborative effort to expand voting access stands in stark relief from other states in which Democrats and Republicans are pushing opposing agendas. Following the 2020 election, Democrats have largely advocated for voting easements, whereas Republicans have backed restrictive measures.
Last year, Vermont was one of a handful of states that decided to mail every voter a ballot to make participating in the election easier and safer amid the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, nearly three-quarters of all registered voters in the state cast a ballot in the 2020 election, and most of them did so early or by mail.
Because the temporary expansion was so popular, state lawmakers decided to make it permanent. The newly enacted law will also give voters the opportunity to "cure," or fix, any mistakes with their ballot, such as a missing signature.
During last year's pandemic-era election, California, Nevada, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., also decided to mail every voter a ballot for that election. Additionally, Montana gave discretion to its 56 counties, most of which decided to proactively mail voters a ballot. Five more states already conducted their elections primarily by mail before the pandemic: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
Like Vermont, Nevada also recently decided to make its temporary vote-by-mail expansion permanent. Last week, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak signed into law a measure that requires voters to opt out of, rather than opt in to, receiving a mail ballot.
National Conference of State Legislatures
In a statement Monday, Scott said he signed the bill because "I believe making sure voting is easy and accessible, and increasing voter participation, is important."
But the governor added that this vote-by-mail expansion should not be limited to just general elections, which already have the highest voter turnout. Scott asked the General Assembly, when it reconvenes in January, to extend the bill's scope to include primary and local elections, as well as school budget votes.
Scott's support for expanding vote by mail access is significant considering several Republican-led states are seeing the exact opposite. In Florida, Georgia and Texas, GOP lawmakers and governors are working to roll back mail voting and impose new, stricter rules. Thus far, Kentucky is the only state with a Republican-controlled legislature that has approved voting expansions.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.