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At a policy forum hosted by Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility at Burlington's Main Street Landing, all but a handful of candidates set to appear on November's ballot showed up to deliver three-minute elevator pitches and answer a few questions each. (Okay, that's a long elevator ride.)

While a couple of the state's top elected officials skipped the event — Gov. Peter Shumlin and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch were at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders was in New York City taping Moyers and Company — most everybody else attended. That gave the sparse crowd of just 40 to 50 people, including candidates and their staff, a helpful sneak preview of campaign themes to come.

Here are seven things we noticed during the two-hour forum:

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That was the question I asked myself Wednesday as I skulked around LaValley Building Supply in West Lebanon, N.H., waiting for something to happen.

Inside was this guy named Mitt Romney, who doesn't like dogs very much and who is also running for president of the United States. He's been at camp this week — debate camp, that is — in nearby West Windsor, Vt. But with Democrats hogging the spotlight down in Charlotte, Romney briefly emerged from his pal's $3.9 million lair to conduct a few television interviews in the closest purple state he could find — in what appeared to be the handtool and glove aisle at LaValley's.

I happened to be in Norwich at the time and, alerted to the visit by a tweet from WCAX-TV's Adam Sullivan (thanks, bro!), I popped on down to the West Leb strip, figuring that if the Romney event was a bust I could at least drop by Lebanon Pet & Aquarium Center to check out the fish.

It was, in fact, a total bust.

Though I waited patiently for nearly two hours, I failed to catch a single glimpse of that perfectly coiffed hair, that casually unbuttoned dress shirt or that reassuringly square jaw. I went there for Mitt, but all I got was Randy Brock.

In a stunning reversal, Secretary of State Jim Condos on Wednesday threw out results from last week's Progressive primary for governor after discovering a series of "human errors" in vote counting.

"In the rush to complete the August 28th primary canvassing report over the long holiday weekend, human errors were made in the calculation of write-in votes for the Progressive Gubernatorial race," Condos (pictured) said in a statement.

Election officials in Hardwick and Walden apparently miscalculated tallies.

As a result, write-in candidate Annette Smith now trails declared winner Martha Abbott by just a single vote out of 735 ballots cast — not the 17-vote margin Condos had certified earlier this week.

Condos hastily scheduled a meeting of the Primary Canvassing Committee for Thursday afternoon in Montpelier to re-certify corrected results.

"As I grew up, my father always told me that if a mistake is made, own up to it, learn from it and move on!" Condos said in a statement.

Raise your hand if you've ever been stuck in traffic behind a tractor on a rural Vermont road. All of you? Okay, that's what I thought.

Well, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is decamping to Vermont for debate prep, and guess what happened?! The Associated Press has the scoop:

Mitt Romney's motorcade, en route to the home of former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey in West Windsor, Vt., on Tuesday morning, got briefly waylaid — by a tractor.

Welcome to Vermont, Mitt! And it's not the first time this week that the Romney caravan's been stuck behind something in a small New England town, as AP reporter Kasie Hunt reports:

Mitt Romney's motorcade is poking through downtown Wolfeboro, stuck behind a trolley.

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) September 2, 2012

This could be a fun game. What else can Romney get stuck behind while he's here? An escaped cow running free? An orchard truck spilling its apples all over the road? The Burlington Snowdragon? It's up to you, Windsor County. This is your moment.

Photo from Stuck in Vermont's 2010 East Charlotte Tractor Parade episode.

Yes we cannabis! That's the refrain pro-pot activists are hoping to hear next week when they ask Burlington City Council to approve a ballot item for the November 6 general election calling for the legalization of marijuana and hemp.

The referendum — "Shall the people of Burlington support the legalization, regulation, and taxation of all marijuana and hemp products?" — is being introduced by Councilor Max Tracy (P-Ward 2). The Greene Street Progressive — yep, he really lives on Greene Street — will formally announce the resolution at a noon press conference on September 5 at Burlington City Hall. A majority of councilors must OK the referendum at their next meeting, on September 10, before it can be added to the November ballot.

Now, don't expect to see phat nugs for sale at the Burlington Farmers Market anytime soon. The nonbinding measure wouldn't actually legalize pot or hemp. Supporters argue it would simply send a strong message to Vermont's politicians.

And what message is that? A) That a sizable chunk of their constituency enjoys the occasional bong hit or two; B) the current policy of spending billions of tax dollars prosecuting and incarcerating people for smoking a largely benign weed is a total buzzkill; C) legalization could save the U.S. an estimated $13.7 billion annually; and D) it won't harm your reelection chances if you support legalization — and keep a box of donuts around the office in case we drop by.

Burlington's smoke-the-vote campaign is being led by the group BTV Green, a new, grassroots group looking to capitalize on nationwide momentum toward repealing the 75-year-old marijuana prohibition. Three other states — Colorado, Oregon and Washington — as well as the city of Detroit, Mich., all have binding referendums on their ballots this fall to legalize, tax and regulate the green stuff.

Albert Petrarca is founder and lead organizer of the BTV Green campaign. Petrarca, a surgical intensive care nurse at Fletcher Allen, points out that, as Vermont doesn't have a public referendum law like those in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, this would simply be a "spirit-of-the-people" measure. That said, if it gets on the November ballot and wins in Burlington, Petrarca intends to take his measure statewide for the 2013 Town Meeting Day.

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At Sanders' annual Labor Day rally and barbecue Monday afternoon in Burlington's Battery Park, you could have it all. And then some.

"What we are saying today is that this country and the wealth of this country belongs to all of the people and not a handful of billionaires," the finger-wagging, self-described socialist told an approving crowd of a couple hundred fellow travelers.

Sanders' 15-minute stem-winder wrapped up a well-attended event featuring a performance by the Gordon Stone Band, remarks from a slew of Vermont labor leaders and — in true Bernie style — plenty of free food for the masses. Ol' Bernardo's warm-up acts stayed on-message, repeatedly calling him a champion of workers' rights and organized labor's favorite U.S. senator. But about a dozen opponents of the proposed basing of F-35 planes at the Vermont Air National Guard's South Burlington headquarters — which Sanders supports — held signs just off-stage protesting Sanders' stance.

We'll have more on the rally in this week's Fair Game, but for now, we leave you with some crappy iPhone-shot photos of the event:

When President Obama heads to Charlotte, N.C., next week for the Democratic National Convention, former governor Mitt Romney will journey north to the one place the national press won't find him.

Reading, Vt.

With the nation's attention turning to the Democratic confab, Romney plans to hunker down at the Reading home of his former lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, to prepare for this fall's three presidential debates.

Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden confirmed to CNN, the Washington Post and others Saturday that the Republican nominee will be in Vermont Tuesday through Thursday. But Madden did not rule out the possibility that Romney would leave the Green Mountains occasionally to campaign in more battleground-y states, according to Reuters:

Madden could not confirm whether Romney would campaign at all during the week of the Democratic National Convention, which runs from Tuesday to Thursday in Charlotte, but he downplayed the move and insisted it was not a reversal of previous plans.

Senior Republican strategists, including Madden, said last month that Romney would have a full campaign schedule, including in battleground states, during the week of the Democratic convention.

"I expect we will have public events, I just don't have them confirmed yet," Madden said.

The Romney campaign had previously announced that Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in Geroge W. Bush's administration, will stand in for Obama during Romney's debate rehearsals. Portman played the same role in 2008 for John McCain's presidential campaign.

If Romney gets bored during debate prep and needs a little inspiration, we suggest he zip on over to the Calvin Coolidge Homestead in nearby Plymouth Notch. Like Romney, Silent Cal served as governor of Massachusetts before seeking the Republican nomination for president.

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Now — on the day his campaign finally announced a forthcoming campaign kickoff event — Shumlin's campaign manager is saying there's not enough time left for the governor to take part in debates held by "special interest groups."

That includes AARP Vermont's traditional gubernatorial debate, which has been held on Vermont Public Television each election cycle since Jim Douglas went tete-a-tete with Doug Racine in 2002. This year it was scheduled for Sept. 18 in South Burlington and was to be moderated, as usual, by former Vermont Public Radio reporter Steve Delaney.

"The reason is because there are roughly eight weeks left before the election, and while the governor is absolutely going to be campaigning, he's going to be focusing on the job Vermonters elected him to do," newly-minted Shumlin campaign manager Alex MacLean said Friday. "If he were to say yes to every request that came in, he would be spending all of his time campaigning."

Asked if she was, in fact, serious that the Shumlin campaign would suggest it was crunched for time after kicking the campaign can down the road for months, MacLean said she was.

"Seriously," she said. "The governor still needs to be governor of the state. He has to balance both campaigning and governing."

Three days after the Vermont primary elections, there's one nail-biter of a race still in contention.

Could Annette Smith — a write-in candidate for governor on the Progressive Party ticket — unseat party chair Martha Abbott as the party's pick for opposing Peter Shumlin?

Smith's supporters won't officially know until next week how their upstart, seat-of-the-pants write-in campaign panned out. The Secretary of State's unofficial tally shows Abbott leading over write-in votes (not all of which may be for Smith) 304-248. With only 77 percent of precincts reporting, Smith supporter Stephanie Kaplan thinks the race could be much closer. She put in a call to Craftsbury, where Smith's fierce opposition of the Lowell wind project has won over some fans, and learned that 33 voters chose a write-in candidate on the Prog ticket. Newark counts another eight. 

In other words, it's a tight race — which is a surprising turn of events in a contest announced just two weeks before the primary, and particularly one in which the candidate herself has refused to campaign, make speeches, or even engage with reporters beyond the reminder (as she told this Seven Dayzer on August 14) that she'd be happy to talk about her advocacy work but not her election.

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Updated below with comment from Bob Stannard

Demonstrating an apparent dearth of self-awareness, a Vermont-based "super-PAC" whose creation opened the door for super PACs to operate in Vermont released a statement Thursday decrying the influence of an out-of-state super PAC in Tuesday's primary election — and using the situation to justify its own existence.

Got it? Didn't think so. Let me take you back.

Six weeks ago, a liberal advocacy group called Vermont Priorities announced it was launching Vermont's first home-grown super PAC, allowing it to raise and spend unlimited funds on state elections. Why? Because the folks behind it — Vermont Priorities chairman Bob Stannard (pictured) and the group's consultant, KSE's Todd Bailey — were greatly a-feared that big, bad out-of-state super PACs would get all up in Vermont's otherwise pure elections.

By starting their own, way more awesome super PAC, Stannard and Bailey reasoned, they'd be ready to do battle with Karl Rove and the dreaded Koch brothers when those dudes inevitably came to town. Meanwhile, without all those pesky campaign finance restrictions, Vermont Priorities would able to raise and spend as much as they liked to elect their fellow liberals to office!