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Retool Election Code
Prime time in a big election year is sometimes called the silly season. This year in New Mexico it was ridiculous. Courtroom battles marked the months before election day. On Nov. 2, some 13,000 provisional ballots were cast in Bernalillo County alone, many by people who thought they were registered. More than half of the 13,000 were rejected. Long before the ballot-counting process ended Friday, it was clear that the cobbled-together, contradictory state election code is a loser.
Lawmakers should start from scratch and rewrite the code in the next legislative session.
It should be easy for citizens to register and to vote, and both processes should have a high degree of confidence. By any reasonable means, the counting of ballots should be streamlined and transparent. The language of elections law must be consistent and clear enough to eliminate what seems to be an endless list of lawyerly arguments about what it might mean.
VOTER REGISTRATION: Armies of volunteers and paid workers added thousands of new voters to the rolls this year. But too many forms were improperly filled out. With some workers being paid by the head, there was an incentive for quantity over doing the job right. Beyond sloppiness, fraud is suspected in more than 200 registrations filed in Bernalillo County.
Workers should not be paid by the head. All registrars, paid or volunteer, should be trained, certified and sworn in by election officials before being set loose on the general public. To assure accountability, forms they turn in should be traceable to them. And the people they are registering should get a receipt or carbon copy that could be filed along with a provisional ballot should the original fail to be filed with the county clerk.
Lawmakers should also explore election-day registration at the polls, currently in effect in six states, including Wyoming and Idaho. With a separate line strictly for registration, it wouldn't slow down voting. There clearly would be added costs, but same-day registration would eliminate middleman registrars and the possibility of discovering on election day, weeks after you believed you had registered, that you're not on the rolls and cannot vote.
VOTER ID: It is hard to read current law and not conclude that someone who does not turn in their own registration at the clerk's office must show ID when they vote. But under the interpretation of the law, if your registration form was turned in by whoever registered 13-year-old Kevin Stout to vote, you don't have to show ID. Meanwhile, anybody who submitted their form by mail must show ID at the polls and, according to another interpretation, the address on the driver's license has to match the address on the registration rolls. The easy way out of this nuttiness is crystal-clear law applied consistently. Everyone shows photo ID every time they vote. The picture has to match the voter; the name on the ID has to match the name on the rolls. Mobility is too high a hurdle for many students and low-income people. A utility bill or anything else with name and address should suffice.
BALLOT HANDLING: Clarify, simplify and make uniform throughout the state how absentee, provisional and in-lieu-of ballots are handled. Lawmakers could expedite the tally by allowing election workers to open the outer envelopes of absentee ballots and sort the ballots before election day and, starting at 12:01 a.m. on the day, to do everything else but tally of votes.
Lawmakers should specify that observers must be allowed to watch each step of the ballot counting, including the statewide canvass by the Secretary of State's Office. The law should clearly lay down the rules for challenging ballots and determine what identifying information on the ballots, like Social Security numbers, should be privileged.
Gov. Bill Richardson and the Legislature should put an election code overhaul high on the list of priorities for the 2005 session.
