EDITORIAL: City councilors should embrace bipartisan effort to discard runoff elections

The results are in from Albuquerque’s City Council runoff election in December: Nichole Rogers won the District 6 race just like she did the first time in November, turnout was abysmal, and the election cost the city $581,000.

The City Council can help eliminate such future waste of taxpayer funds by voting Monday in favor of a bipartisan proposal that could lead to the elimination of runoff elections, if that’s the direction voters want to go in November with several proposed amendments to the city’s charter.

The Bernalillo County Clerk’s Office estimated in November that it would cost between $600,000 and $750,000 to run the District 6 runoff on Dec. 12 between Nichole Rogers and Jeff Hoehn.

Election costs have soared post-pandemic, primarily due to long-overdue pay raises for poll officials statewide that doubled their salaries. The costs of ballot paper and leasing polling stations have also increased significantly.

In 2021, it cost the city of Albuquerque $375,000 to run two City Council runoff elections to determine the winner of the District 7 and District 9 races.

This time, Bernalillo County billed the city $558,105.40 to run December’s District 6 runoff election, the city Clerk's Office recently told the Editorial Board. In addition to printing ballots and paying poll workers, the county opened five early voting convenience centers in Southeast Albuquerque on Nov. 21 strictly for the District 6 runoff.

There wasn’t much going on at them. Only 4,629 votes from 33,000 eligible voters were cast in the runoff, compared to 7,409 in the Local Election in November. City Councilor Klarissa Peña, one of the sponsors of the charter amendment to eliminate runoffs, says low voter turnout remains a problem in certain communities.

“We’re in really difficult political times, and people feel like their voices aren’t being heard,” Peña said at the City Council’s June 17 meeting. “When we have such small voter turnouts, and even smaller the second time around, then something’s wrong.”

The city incurred other District 6 runoff costs in addition to the $558,105.40 bill from the county. Rogers received $20,000 of public financing for the runoff and the city incurred $3,059.25 of expenses for the campaign finance auditor, taking the grand total of the runoff election to $581,164.65.

Some say you can’t put a price on democracy. But if you did, it would equate to a cost of $125.55 per vote.

And none of it mattered.

Rogers received 40.1% of the votes in the Nov. 7 election, while second-place finisher Jeff Hoehn received 32%. The other two candidates split the remainder.

But because of a Byzantine city charter amendment approved in 2013 requiring a majority vote to win, the city was obliged to hold a runoff election 45 days later between Rogers and Hoehn on Dec. 12.

Rogers won 52.2% of the vote in the runoff to Hoehn’s 47.8%, and the race was finally settled — with no change from November.

Since a 50%-plus-one threshold for victory was added in 2013, municipal elections in Albuquerque are routinely followed by expensive and unnecessary runoffs between the top two candidates. Runoffs are practically guaranteed when there are three or four candidates, such as there were in the District 6 race in November.

Charter amendment Proposal P-24-1 would change all of that.

The City Council took a step toward tried-and-tested and much more efficient democracy on June 17 when it approved on a 6-3 bipartisan vote an amendment to the city charter removing any threshold needed for victory in a municipal race.

Adoption of the amendment would mean the city would use the same top vote-getter wins model that we’ve been using for state and county elections since statehood — with no more municipal runoffs in Albuquerque.

Unfortunately, the amendment is being politicized as some kind of vendetta against Mayor Tim Keller, who wouldn’t be impacted by it if he runs for reelection in 2025 because the city charter amendment, if ratified by voters in November, wouldn’t apply until city races in 2027.

The mayor, who vetoed Proposal P-24-1 setting up an override vote by the City Council on Monday, and others who support runoff elections are on the wrong side of history.

Not long ago, school board races in New Mexico were held in February, most municipal elections were held in March (with Albuquerque holding its in October), and races for water and soil conservancy districts and other local elections could be held anytime throughout the year.

Our elections were a mess, and turnout was suffering, especially in school board races.

Hagerman, with a population of about 1,250 people in south-central Chaves County, held a school board race in February 2015 in which not a single vote was cast — not even by the candidates themselves for three school board seats.

After a legal review of what to do, incumbent Hagerman Municipal Schools board members appointed three people to the three positions that were up for election.

Something had to be done to clean up New Mexico’s election process.

So, state lawmakers passed the Local Election Act in 2018, which dramatically streamlined voting and consolidated all school board and other local nonpartisan elections, which today includes almost all New Mexico municipalities, in November of odd-numbered years — with no threshold for victory needed other than receiving the most votes.

Albuquerque’s runoff elections are a vestige of our formerly overloaded elections. It is time to relegate them to the ash heap of history and streamline the city’s elections by removing runoffs.

The bipartisan coalition of city councilors who voted for Proposal P-24-1 in June should stick by their prior votes and vote Monday to override the mayor’s veto by the two-thirds margin needed, sending the issue of runoff elections to voters to decide for themselves in November.

Voter ratification of Proposal P-24-1 eliminating runoffs would save the city a lot of wasteful spending, greatly simplify local elections and adopt the same winner-wins model that applies in New Mexico in races for school board and college regent to county sheriff and county clerk to U.S. senator and presidential electors.

Eliminating runoff elections would also ensure no winning candidate the first time around would have to run the same race twice.