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SANTA FE – A review of election records has found that 641 dead New Mexicans remain on voter registration rolls, a top official in the Secretary of State’s Office said Wednesday.

That information will be part of a report to the Legislature on preliminary findings of a review of voter registration records, said Ken Ortiz, chief of staff for Secretary of State Dianna Duran. The report may be released as early as today.

He said the office hasn’t been able to determine whether any ballots were cast using the names of dead voters because it is still trying to get the dates of death.

In a letter to county clerks last week, Duran said her office is trying to determine why an automated program isn’t working properly to match voter registration information with monthly lists of deaths from the state’s Vital Records Office. Ortiz said it’s possible the coding of the death records is causing problems.

Duran said the state can’t purge its voter registration files of inactive voters this year or in 2013 because her predecessor didn’t follow procedures that allow for that under federal law, such as sending out notices to determine whether a voter’s address remains valid.

Denise Lamb, who runs the Elections Bureau in Santa Fe County and is a former state elections director, said county elections officials check death notices published in local newspapers to try to update voter files.

“I would be very surprised if we had any voting by the dead, because we can barely get the living to vote,” Lamb said.

Slightly more than half of eligible New Mexico voters cast ballots in the 2010 general election.

About 1.1 million New Mexicans are registered to vote. Duran, a Republican, raised questions earlier in the year that some noncitizens may be wrongly registered to vote in the state. The issue arose after her office checked records of foreign nationals, potentially including illegal immigrants, who have received driver’s licenses under a 2003 law that Republican Gov. Susana Martinez proposes to repeal.

Independently of the election records review, Duran said, two foreign nationals have voluntarily said they were registered voters but only recently learned that was illegal. Duran’s office has notified the state Attorney General’s Office and said the individuals may have misunderstood the law and perhaps unintentionally violated state election law.

Duran’s office has been examining the list of registered voters, including checking the list against personal information in driver’s license and Social Security records. Ortiz said that review continues and the report to lawmakers will provide an “update of where we are at, what we’ve been able to identify and what we are working on.”
— This article appeared on page C1 of the Albuquerque Journal