By Julia Purdy
A prominent thread woven into the fabric of present-day Vermont is the question of the “two Vermonts” — the old versus the new, the traditional versus the forward-looking, the rural versus the urban, the economically depressed versus the financially flush, and the assumptions and expectations on both sides.
A particular issue has always been — at least in Vermont — fair representation in the State House, at least as numbers go. Prior to 1965, the Vermont Constitution had for 188 years upheld fair representation as “one town one vote.” That simplistic system was upended as a result of the 1964 Supreme Court ruling that in order to achieve parity of representation — not just in Vermont but across the nation — legislative districts at both the state and congressional level must contain approximately the same number of people across all districts, formerly known as “one man one vote.”
Since representation also assures a measure of political influence, this ruling both broke open the inequities and exacerbated them as both parties or individuals struggled for dominance, or in some cases, just to keep a toehold.
Until that ruling, the formulas for representation were haphazard from state to state, to say the least. Some were based on raw population counts; others were based on geography. Still others were based on registered voters. They were supposed to reflect the shifts in population as masses of people moved into or out of jurisdictions. The intent was to more evenly distribute political power that was often deeply rooted in history, culture and tradition. But perhaps the unintended consequence on the local level was to consolidate power differently.
The U.S. Supreme Court itself had until now avoided political embroilments, letting the states go their own way. As Justice Felix Frankfurter remarked, “courts should not enter this political thicket.” On the other hand, anything other than the one-man-one-vote principle was considered to be a “malapportionment,” lopsided representation. At its worst, it could act to suppress the vote, particularly among black voters, who were deemed to vote Democrat.
In 1964 the Warren Court shed its neutral stance and ruled that malapportionment violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “legislators represent people, not trees or acres” and “legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”
The decision was quickly followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which sharpened the focus on black voter suppression in specific states by requiring that “reapportionment plans must take into account the percentage of the minority voters in that state and and develop … plans that enhance the possibility of minority voters electing minority representatives to the legislature.” The intent was to level the playing field.
But critics immediately pointed out that reapportionment created an imbalance of another sort. It was noted that cities, economic interests and farms also embody actual people, who often have conflicting needs, priorities and assumptions; for example, a robust representation based on city-dwellers, whose priorities tend to rely on public services, may win the day, while the rural areas right outside the city, while they may agree in principle, struggle to balance the household ledger in real time and literally cannot afford what they see as expenditures that only occasionally benefit them.
As the Vermont experience shows, reapportionment has cut both ways when the objective veered away from representation of all views and, as nationally, became a horse race with winners and losers.
Vermont has a total population less than that of the average Midwestern city; the Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) classifies Vermont as a rural state, with the exception of Chittenden, Franklin, and Grand Isle counties. Ever since the days of the Vermont Republic, the towns have had immediate, localized authority over everyday affairs from roads to public records, budgets to property taxes. The towns were founded as mini-corporations, with their own charters, bylaws, governing bodies, and budgets; Town Meeting Day is the equivalent of the annual meeting of an employee-owned company.
So, in keeping with the ethos of “freedom and unity,” it clearly made sense to the drafters of the state constitution that each town, regardless of size, send a representative to the General Assembly — which, in the republic, met at the various county seats, making itself available to the local populace. “One town one vote” spoke to the homogeneous character of Vermont, centered on farming and timber; although towns might conflict with each other over boundaries or land use, for example, they all had the same needs and interests in common as an agrarian culture; they went along to get along.
The Vermont State Archives & Records webpage describes the very lopsided “malapportionment” that prevailed with the one-town-one-vote system as Vermont gained population, especially in the urban centers. As early as 1856, it was understood that of the populations of towns could hold a majority in the legislature. In 1963, tiny Stratton sent one representative to the House as did the 35,531 residents of Burlington. And although the 22 largest municipalities shared less than 9% of House representation, those 22 were paying 64% of the total income tax revenues and more than half of the property taxes.
No wonder, then, that Buckley v. Hoff, brought in Vermont District Court in 1964, charged that the “citizens of the state’s larger communities are invidiously discriminated against…” the operative term being “invidiously,” that is, “malicious, hostile or damaging” in legal parlance. T. Garry Buckley was a Republican businessman, state senator from Bennington and former lieutenant governor under the old regime. But in an odd twist, he and others worked to get Hoff elected in 1962 through the ad-hoc Vermont Independent Party, replacing the incumbent, Republican Ray Keyser, in retaliation for a decision Keyser made that favored a business competitor of theirs. “We weren’t altruistically supporting [Hoff,]” Buckley said later. “… we got Hoff the votes he needed to win.”
When reapportionment became the law of the land, Vermont’s political apple cart was overturned. Democrats were jubilant, Republicans genuinely grieved. Vermont had been reliably Republican until the early 1960s, populated by moderate Republicans, who shared many views in common with Democrats and independents.
Responding to the federal mandate and to pressure from the so-called “Young Turks,” which included the newly re-elected Democrat governor Phil Hoff and the Republican Speaker of the House, Franklin Billings of Woodstock, in 1965 the Vermont Legislature passed a plan for reapportionment, and overnight the number of House representatives in Montpelier dropped from 246 to 150.
The pain was palpable. But what was lost — and mourned — was more than just a party nametag. Suddenly lost was town pride, a sense of meaningful purpose in government proceedings, and above all a sense of relevance. The iconic small Vermont town would be “swallowed up” by its more populous neighbor, said one letter to legislators. “In the new district the representative will have no interest in such a small drop in the much larger puddle,” said another.
Tiny towns were in effect disenfranchised, their independent stature diminished. Frank Hutchins of Stannard, pop. 113, stood with tears running down his cheeks, as reported by Steve Terry of the Rutland Herald, who was there. Hutchins felt that the very fabric of Vermont was being ripped to shreds. ironically, fewer farmers — in a predominantly agricultural state, both economically and geographically — would go to Montpelier.
Time magazine commented: “… [the Democratic party] is strongest in the towns and cities that would be fairly represented in the state assembly for the first time. Lieutenant Governor John J. Daley trumpeted that Vermont would once again become a ‘one-party state’ — for the Democrats.”
Until 1924, the exact number of delegates fluctuated between one and two at first, but then an amendment established one representative per town. While that meant that the average constituency numbered about 1,400, even at that “the political reality was that Vermont had the smallest representative to citizen ratio in the United States,” according to Vermont History Quarterly, Spring 1993. And the 1990 Decennial Census data resulted in the “ideal” population for each House district of 3,752 persons.
This time around, the Legislature will be asked to look at redistricting to address nagging imbalances as Vermont’s voting population mushrooms. Chittenden, for example, has one representative, but Pittsford next door has two. The Senate is even more unbalanced with Orange County sending one senator to Montpelier while Chittenden County has six senators to call on. On a squeaker vote, the legislative apportionment board recommends all districts be single-member, echoing the decision in 1924.
Reapportionment remains a continual work-in-progress. Representation is arrived at quite simply: the Decennial Census count divided by 150 legislative seats. When the 2000 Census tallied 597,921 souls, districts were set at 3,986. After the 2010 Census tallied up 622,433, each district encompassed about 4,150; and currently the ideal number of residents per representative is about 4,287, based on the 2020 count of 643,077.
Vermont’s town-gown jostling for representation in Montpelier can be bitter, as Chittenden County priorities appear to some to overshadow the rural areas due to the imbalance of representation from the most populous districts in the state. The memory of the great paradigm shift of 1965 is still fresh in the minds of Vermonters who felt betrayed. But as a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court observation in Kurcher v. Daggett reminded the nation, “no apportionment plan hammered out in a partisan political environment ‘is free from political bias.’”
But we keep trying.
