Montpelier
Instead it got a “collective” response from more than half of the incumbents, and no response at all from two of them, undermining the effort to give voters greater insight into the individual policy positions of their elected county prosecutors, the ACLU said.
The state’s attorney’s association said the group response was issued to time constraints and the “presumptive” nature of some of the questions, but that it still felt it met the goal of making the candidates’ positions known.
“All of the candidates were asked to respond to a voters’ education survey in their own words, stating their personal views on issues of critical importance to Vermont,” James Duff Lyall, executive director of the Vermont ACLU, said this week.
Eight of the 14 incumbent county prosecutors submitted a “collective” response, and four other incumbents used large parts of that “collective” response in their submissions.
“It’s unfortunate that more candidates didn’t respond in their own words and we hope that they’ll reconsider and provide their constituents with more personalized information,” Lyall said.
Four candidates, two incumbents and two challengers, did not respond to the survey questions at all, according the ACLU.
A state’s attorney is elected for a four-year term in each of the state’s 14 counties. The position pays about about $110,000 a year.
The ACLU provided the candidates for state’s attorney across Vermont the 20-survey question, posting the response on its website this week. The survey questions sought candidates’ views on a range of topics, including bail, sentencing, transparency and accountability by law enforcement.
The “collective” response to the survey was submitted by the state’s Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs Association, with eight incumbent state’s attorneys signing on.
John Campbell, executive director of the Vermont Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs Association, said the process of drafting the “collective” answers still allowed the incumbents clarify their positions on the issues.
“The attorneys thought by providing what they considered to be collectively the major policies of the offices, that this was in fact addressing the issues the ACLU wanted to touch upon,” Campbell said.
David Cahill, Windsor County state’s attorney, is listed by the ACLU as having declined to respond the survey.
Reached on Tuesday, Cahill provided a three-paragraph response he submitted to the ACLU survey questions, saying that he was “struggling with the survey’s requirement of a binary yes or no answer to many questions where the most accurate answer would be ‘It depends upon the facts of the case. Let me explain….’ ”
He added, ‘For this reason, I am unable to provide you with a completed survey.”
Cahill cited the survey’s instructions, which read in part, “Where neither ‘Yes’ nor ‘No’ is selected, or if you choose not to complete this survey, we will indicate in the Voter Guide that no response was received.”
Lyall said this week that he had a different reading of the instructions, and said the organization did post answers from candidates in which neither “yes” nor “no” was selected.
Lyall said if Cahill still wanted to submit a survey, the ACLU would be happy to post it.