The Burlington-born jam-rock group Phish raised more than $4 million last weekend at a trio of concerts to benefit the Vermont-based addiction-recovery organization founded by the band’s guitarist, Trey Anastasio.

The Oct. 25-27 concerts at the MVP Arena in Albany, New York raised money to kick off a $10 million fundraising campaign for the Divided Sky Residential Recovery Program in Ludlow. The money will help pay for capital improvements, property acquisition, staffing increases and a scholarship fund. Anastasio, who has been frank about his own experience with addiction, opened Divided Sky last year with co-founder Melanie Gulde.

“It’s hard to put into words how grateful we are to Phish and their fans for this generosity,” Gulde, who serves as Divided Sky’s program director, said in a news release announcing the fundraising result. “But this isn’t about words – it’s about action. And because of these concerts, we will be able to help many more people take charge of their lives and to recover from addictions.”

Money was raised at the concerts through ticket and merchandise sales and a pay-per-view livestream. According to the news release, 100% of net proceeds will support the Divided Sky Foundation.

The Divided Sky Residential Recovery Program focuses on helping people build life tools to maintain sobriety while staying active and involved in the outdoors and pursuing their personal passions, according to the news release. Nearly a dozen alumni who have completed the 30-day program were at the Albany concerts. More than 300 tickets were given to people who work in recovery or a related mental-health field.

This is the second straight year that the band that started at the University of Vermont in 1983 has raised money to benefit the state where Phish began. Last year, Phish played two benefit concerts at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in New York that raised more than $3.5 million for flood-recovery efforts in Vermont and upstate New York, according to the news release.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com.

John Rodgers, the Republican candidate for Vermont lieutenant governor, announced endorsements Wednesday from the state’s three most recent governors — among them, notably, former Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin. 

Rodgers has already been backed publicly by the state’s current chief executive,  Republican Gov. Phil Scott. But in a press release Wednesday, Rodgers, who is vying to unseat the office’s Progressive/Democratic incumbent, David Zuckerman, said he also has the backing of Shumlin and former Republican Gov. Jim Douglas. 

In the release, Rodgers’ campaign framed the endorsement as “unprecedented” bipartisan support for a candidate seeking the state’s second-highest office. But the party dynamics, Shumlin contended in an interview on Wednesday, are “murky.”

The former three-term governor pointed to how Rodgers identified as a Democrat while serving for nearly two decades in the Legislature, only running as a Republican when he announced his bid for lieutenant governor earlier this year. (Rodgers has hesitated to fully embrace the GOP label himself, he said recently.) And Shumlin noted, as well,  how Zuckerman has long allied himself with the Vermont Progressive Party. 

“Let’s remember that one of them’s a Democrat, and the other one’s a Progressive, in my view,” Shumlin said, adding that he thinks Rodgers’ messaging is more in line with the majority of voters on one of this year’s most animating issues — affordability. 

“You won’t find a more dedicated, logical individual who understands working Vermonters better than John Rodgers,” Shumlin said. He said that includes voters who have “common sense,” are “hard working,” have “limited incomes” and are “watching property taxes.” 

Shumlin added that Rodgers, who owns a stonework and excavation business, also “can build you the straightest, most beautiful stone wall you’ve ever seen.”

Both Zuckerman and Rodgers are also farmers, and the two have clashed repeatedly on the campaign trail over the details of their backgrounds as they both seek to appeal to working-class voters.

Rodgers, like Scott, has been deeply critical of the Legislature’s Democratic leadership in debates and other forums this fall. Asked if he shared those sentiments, too, Shumlin contended that, “I don’t agree with John Rodgers on everything.” 

“This is not an indictment of anybody,” he said, referring to his endorsement.

Shumlin’s backing comes less than a week before Election Day on Nov. 5. The former governor said Rodgers reached out to him seeking his endorsement, and the two finally connected this week, a conversation that spurred Shumlin to declare his support. 

While Shumlin is perhaps the highest-profile Democrat to endorse Rodgers, Rodgers has a number of GOP backers, too. That includes Rep. Casey Toof, R-St. Albans, who is also Rodgers’ campaign manager, as well as John Klar, a firebrand writer and farmer from Brookfield who’s campaigned heavily on culture war issues in the past.

Reached by phone Wednesday, Zuckerman pointed to his own slate of endorsements, including from another former Democratic governor, Madeleine Kunin, as well as from the prominent environmental activist, Bill McKibben. He also highlighted his support from Vermont Conservation Voters, an environmental group, and a number of unions, including the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

The lieutenant governor, who is seeking his fourth term this year, also has support from numerous Democratic leaders in the Statehouse. 

“I have fought long and hard to increase the minimum wage and fight for universal health care,” Zuckerman said, asked to respond to Shumlin’s comments about working voters, “so that everyday Vermonters would be better off.”

With one week to go until Election Day, millions of Americans — and thousands of Vermonters — have already cast their ballots.

The Green Mountain State permanently expanded mail-in voting after it drove record turnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, which means more and more of the work of administering an election happens before the first Tuesday of November.

So, what actually happens after you drop your envelope in the mailbox? Vermont Public’s Bob Kinzel spent a morning with election officials in Montpelier, including City Clerk John Odum, to learn firsthand how ballots are processed and what measures are in place to keep results secure.

More from Vermont Public: Vermont has become one of the easiest places to vote in the country, but gaps remain

This story was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Bob Kinzel: All right, so what we’re going to do is walk out to the ballot drop box just outside City Hall.

John Odum: This is some kind of box. This thing is tough to get into. It takes two keys. The slot is very narrow and is protected by a sort of metal lip over it, so nobody’s getting in there unless they’re jamming a ballot up in there. Nobody’s pouring gasoline into it and lighting it on fire. It’s, it’s more secure than that.

OK. Got our ballots.

Bob Kinzel: OK, so we’ve got ballots from the ballot box, and now we’re going to bring them back into your office. What are we going to do with them?

John Odum: We’re going to open them up. Well, we’re going to open up the ones from the mailers, and then we’ll put aside the actual ballots in the ballot envelope. We don’t need the mailing envelope at all anymore, but we will, for now, keep those ballots inside their sealed and signed envelopes.

Bob Kinzel: Odum brings the ballots back into his office and gives them to Deputy City Clerk Sara McMillon, who processes them at her desk. She uses the city’s electronic checklist to record that a voter has officially sent in a ballot. It’s a system that prevents a person from voting twice.

Sara McMillon: And so then that checks it in, and then I know, it keeps a record that that person has voted. And so then the voter can log in online, and they can see that we’ve received their ballot. If someone hasn’t signed it or someone hasn’t dated it, then we mark it as defective, and then we, we can call them and have them come into City Hall to cure the ballot, or we can send them out a letter that’s that they can send back to us, saying that it’s OK for us to count their ballot, even though it’s not signed.

Bob Kinzel: Clerk Odum then takes the ballot envelopes and places them in the city’s vault for safe keeping. They stay there until local election officials begin the tabulation process. It’s a process that can take place for several weeks before Election Day. The optical scan machine counts the number of ballots that are fed into it, but it does not reveal any of the results until Election Day.

John Odum: And again, I keep that padlocked because our vault is so small, I need, I feel like I need to keep a little extra security here. But yeah, so they stay there, and then we take them out when it’s time to run them through the tabulator, which I’ve got some folks doing right now.

So we have one person who will open them up and put them face down. But the idea is that if this person is putting the envelopes down, then this person who takes the ballots out never sees the name. So nobody ever sees both a ballot and a name associated with a ballot. Everything is always locked down. It’s always in the vault. Soon as I, soon as these folks are done, I lock it back up, put it right back in the vault. And this is, we’re just using the one; we’re going to be running three more machines during the Election Day.

Bob Kinzel: The optical scan machines are locked up back in the vault after they’ve been used, and they have small blue seals on the cover that clearly indicate if the machine has been tampered with in any way.

John Odum: Where we verify that these, that these seals have not changed, and you’d have to get into the seals to get the programming cards. Now, could you get in and change those numbers? That’s awfully hard to imagine. If you could get in. I think the biggest worry when you start talking about cybersecurity with these tabulators is mischief — not so much changing numbers, but trying to get in there and just mess something up so we have to run ballots again, or something like that.

These things aren’t connected to any network. They don’t have any modems, like cellular modems going, so in terms of physical security, they’re as good as you get. Somebody would have to physically come up to the machine and access it and break those seals and get in there and take a card, one of the memory cards out there, do something with it, you know, snap it in half or something. So no, we don’t have those kind of concerns at all. And I’m really grateful for that, it’s not difficult to tell if there’s been any kind of breach.

Bob Kinzel: Processing these early mail-in ballots has kept the Montpelier City Clerk’s office very busy these days, and this is true for many communities across the state. That’s because, in many towns, as many as half of their voters will cast their ballot this year using the mail-in system.

Peter Engisch provided production support for this story.

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