Everyone Calm Down;
Count Vote in the Open
New Mexico is going through what seems to have become its traditional post-election vote-counting dilemma, with confusion and rhetoric in great supply.
One feeds the other and it's not good for the integrity of the process.
This year brought a new wrinkle with thousands of provisional paper ballots on top of a bumper crop of absentee and so-called in-lieu-of-ballots. More than 19,000 of these ballots remain to be verified or counted, or both. It's anyone's guess how many will be disallowed if the voter's eligibility cannot be confirmed.
The number of outstanding ballots -- and potential votes -- is greater than President Bush's unofficial 8,588-vote lead over John Kerry, but it appears highly unlikely Kerry will take the lead and the state's five electoral votes.
Meanwhile, Republican leaders have reacted strongly to vote-counting delays and premature television reports that Kerry had taken the lead -- two days after the Associated Press called Bush the winner in New Mexico. In the end, as anyone should be willing to concede, vote counts trump projections.
But the counting must be conducted in the open. The actions of Doña Ana and Sandoval county clerks do a great disservice to public confidence when they seek to bar outside observers.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron has added to the confusion with incomplete vote totals on her Web site. She should consider taking it offline while totals are being updated, or include clear disclaimers. That Web site was the basis for erroneous news reports that Kerry had taken the vote count lead.
The political party leaders in New Mexico, Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson, agree there should be a better and faster way to count votes. They're right, and they should work together to make that happen next time.
For now, the existing vote-counting process takes time, and every legitimate vote should be counted.
Partisans of every stripe should be patient and tone down the rhetoric, and public officials involved in the counting need to make sure the process is absolutely transparent.
opinion 
New Mexico is going through what seems to have become its traditional post-election vote-counting dilemma, with confusion and rhetoric in great supply.
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