Almost 200,000 New Mexicans who have taken the trouble to register to vote have decided not to declare an affiliation with a political party. And every primary Election Day, those almost 200,000 New Mexicans are told not to trouble themselves by casting a ballot.
Rep. Andy Nuñez of Hatch, the Legislature’s only independent member, wants to change that. Every member of the New Mexico Legislature who understands and values a representative democracy over the captive audience of party politics should as well. Nuñez’s House Joint Resolution 19 would allow registered voters who are not affiliated with the Democratic or Republican parties to cast ballots in one of those parties’ state-run primaries. However lawmakers chose to set up such a system, it should prevent the current widespread voter disenfranchisement of New Mexico’s closed-primary system that keeps almost one out of every five voters home on primary Election Day. New Mexico’s closed primaries force Declined To State voters to wait on the sidelines while candidates pander to the extremists in their party’s base; then voters have to pick between two candidates who may have little to no centrist appeal come general Election Day. Nuñez estimates that if New Mexico had open primaries, as much as 40 percent of voters would Decline To State a party on their voter registration. And yet they would all have the opportunity to cast a ballot — likely for a candidate who has a better shot at going the distance come the general election — and have their voices heard every Election Day. This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
