Montpelier — Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos this week sharply criticized legislation that has passed the U.S. House and is pending in the Senate authorizing the president to send armed federal agents into polling places.

“This action is more emblematic of a totalitarian government than the democracy that I and other elected officials, including the president and members of Congress, have sworn an oath to protect,” Condos said in a statement dated Tuesday.

Condos, a Democrat in his fourth two-year term who’s now the president-elect of the National Association of Secretaries of State, joined a bipartisan group of his colleagues in calling for the “damaging and concerning provision” to be removed from the bill in which it is contained, a reauthorization for the Department of Homeland Security.

On March 9, the group wrote to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, that the provision “allows Secret Service personnel unlimited access to polling places pursuant to the President’s direction. This is an alarming proposal which raises the possibility that armed federal agents will be patrolling neighborhood precincts and vote centers.”

The state officials quoted current federal law that they said “makes it a crime for a military or civil officer in the service of the United States to bring or keep their troops ‘at any place where a general or special election is held’ — unless it is necessary to protect against an armed invasion.”

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the main sponsor of the DHS reauthorization bill, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday afternoon on why the provision in question might be necessary.