SANTA FE – Maggie Toulouse Oliver was sworn in Friday as New Mexico’s secretary of state, pledging to start immediately to restore trust and boost accountability and transparency in the troubled office that oversees elections and ethics.
“I’m ready to get to work,” Toulouse Oliver told more than 100 people who jammed the small courtroom at the state Supreme Court for a brief swearing-in ceremony.
A Democrat who resigned as longtime Bernalillo County Clerk earlier Friday, Toulouse Oliver will serve until 2018, filling out the remaining two years of the term of Dianna Duran.
Duran, the first Republican elected to the job in 80 years, resigned in October 2015 after nearly five years in office, pleaded guilty to misusing her campaign donations for gambling, and went to jail for a month.
Toulouse Oliver took over from Republican Brad Winter, an Albuquerque city councilor whom Gov. Susana Martinez appointed a year ago to run the office until a successor to Duran was elected. Winter spoke at the swearing-in, saying Toulouse Oliver has been “great to work with” in Albuquerque.
Toulouse Oliver told the crowd that barriers to the ballot must be removed, and there must be “absolute certainty that for every eligible New Mexican who wishes to vote, they will have an easy and secure way to do so.”
In an interview after the ceremony, she said she would immediately be wrestling with budget issues for the current fiscal year and the next – a process she said was already underway.
“We’re going to have to be creative” and find ways to make the office’s operations, and elections, more efficient, she said.
Among her highest priorities also will be a revamp of the Campaign Finance Information System – the online database of election-related contributions and expenditures – and coming up with new draft rules governing campaign finance, including more disclosure for the political action committees known as super PACs, she said.
There were new draft rules under consideration when Duran resigned, but that process then stalled.
Toulouse Oliver said she also will be supporting ethics commission legislation – perhaps multiple proposals – in the coming legislative session.
“My message to people today is that we’re going to be putting in rules and processes and procedures that are intended to hold elected officials … at all levels of government accountable, and that includes the secretary of state,” she said.
She said she would fill two vacancies next week, naming a deputy secretary and an executive assistant.
Toulouse Oliver, 40, had run for the position – the state’s third-highest, after governor and lieutenant governor – two years ago, but Duran beat her and was elected to a second term.
This year, she defeated Republican state Rep. Nora Espinoza in the Nov. 8 general election with more than 56 percent of the vote.
Toulouse Oliver was appointed Bernalillo County clerk to fill an unexpired term beginning in January 2007, and was elected to four-year terms in 2008 and 2012.
Before that, she spent 13 years as a political consultant and campaign organizer.
