EDITORIAL: Election winners shouldn't be asked to run the same race twice

If you venture out to watch phenom Gianna Rahmer run a 3,200-meter race, you’ll see the winner is the first runner to run around the track eight times — almost certainly Gianna.

It doesn’t matter if there were nine, 10 or 11 other runners, or how close the finish was. The runner who crosses the finish line first wins. No sane athletic director would ask the top two finishers to subsequently run in a 100-meter runoff.

All track events operate under the first-place finisher wins model, because it’s the fairest way of determining who won the race. There’s no sense in asking Gianna, the Journal’s Female Metro Athlete of the Year, to run a race twice. The Hoover Middle School eighth-grader done won once — actually three events during May’s Class 4A-5A State Track and Field Championships.

The same first-place finisher “winner-wins” model has applied in presidential elections for 236 years. The presidential and vice presidential candidates who receive the most votes in a given state win all of that state’s electoral votes, not withstanding Maine and Nebraska, which have their own quirky method of awarding electors.

Take 2016, for example. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won 48% of the votes in New Mexico in a three-way race with Donald Trump and former Gov. Gary Johnson. Clinton therefore received all five of New Mexico’s electors. There was no runoff between Clinton and second-place Trump, who received 40% of votes.

The same winner-wins model will apply in New Mexico this fall in races for U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. There will be no runoffs, no matter how many candidates qualify.

At the state level, the winner of races for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, state auditor, state treasurer, and commissioner of public lands are all determined by which candidate gets the most votes. Period. There are no thresholds for victory, nor runoffs, regardless of how many candidates run.

At the county level, sheriffs, county commissioners, assessors, clerks, treasurers and probate judges are also determined by the winner-wins model. There are no thresholds for victory in any New Mexico county race. Not one, bar a mathematically improbable tie. Then it often literally comes down to a coin toss, not a runoff.

Even at the municipal level, with the exceptions of New Mexico’s home-rule cities, races for mayor and city council and municipal judge are decided by the winner-wins model. The state’s Local Election Act mandates that the top vote-getter is to be declared the winner in those races.

But state lawmakers have erringly allowed the state’s home-rule cities of Alamogordo, Albuquerque, Clovis, Gallup, Grants, Hobbs, Las Cruces, Las Vegas, Los Alamos, Rio Rancho, Santa Fe and Silver City to carve out their own election rules, and look at the mess they’ve made of their local elections with ranked-choice voting, perpetual runoff elections, public financing and other schemes, all of which prove problematic.

Remember September 2021, when Mayor Tim Keller’s appointed city clerk again denied Bernalillo County Sheriff Manuel Gonzales’ application for $600,000 in public campaign financing for his mayoral bid? The city’s Board of Ethics determined that Gonzales’ campaign had violated the rules by submitting a receipt and $5 for a voter who signed a receipt, but never paid.

An appointee of the mayor denying Gonzales campaign funds in the late stages of the race didn’t look awfully democratic.

Since a 50%-plus-one threshold for victory was added in a special election in 2013, municipal elections in Albuquerque are routinely followed by expensive and unnecessary runoffs between the top two candidates.

Take the most recent municipal election in November. Four candidates were vying for the seat of former City Councilor Pat Davis. Unless one of the four Democrats pulled away with a big lead to represent Southeast Albuquerque, the District 6 race was destined for a runoff.

Nichole 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.

That should have been the end of it and Rogers declared the winner. But because of the Byzantine city charter amendment approved in 2013 requiring a majority vote to win, the city was obliged to hold a runoff election 45 days after the initial election between Rogers and Hoehn on Dec. 12.

The Bernalillo County Clerk’s Office estimated the runoff election would cost between $600,000 and $750,000 to run, compared to $375,000 in 2021 for two runoff elections for City Council seats. Election costs have skyrocketed since the statewide salaries of poll officials were doubled, while costs for ballot paper and leasing polling stations have also increased.

Turnout in the District 6 runoff was abysmal, as expected. Of 33,000 eligible voters, only 4,629 votes were cast, compared to 7,409 in the local election in November.

Rogers raked in 52.2% of the vote in the runoff to Hoehn’s 47.8%. The race was finally settled — with no change from November, just a mammoth bill to host a single runoff in one of nine City Council districts.

“When we have such small voter turnouts, and even smaller the second time around, then something’s wrong,” points out City Councilor Klarissa Peña.

Yes, in a perfect world, a strong candidate would emerge in every municipal election with more than 50% of the votes. But if a candidate can’t muster a majority, that’s on him or her, not the voters.

In a May 15 Journal op-ed, state Sen. Katy Duhigg, D-Albuquerque, a former Albuquerque city clerk, wrote in opposition to charter amendments under consideration by the Albuquerque City Council, saying “The whole idea of democracy is that the winner should get a majority of the vote.”

Oh really? Will anyone on the political left suggest a runoff election in New Mexico if the Democratic presidential nominee fails to receive a majority of N.M. votes, as Hillary Clinton failed to muster in 2016?

The Albuquerque City Council took a step toward tried-and-tested democracy Monday night and early Tuesday morning when it approved an amendment to the City Charter removing any threshold needed for victory in a municipal race — that would be the same winner-wins model we’ve been using for state and county elections since statehood.

Mayor Keller has threatened to veto Proposal P-24-1, but it won’t matter if the 6-3 City Council bipartisan coalition holds, which we hope it does, and overrides the mayor’s veto. Then, voters will have the final say in November.

“(Voters) should decide how they want the government to run,” City Council president Dan Lewis said in a statement early Tuesday. “I trust the voters.”

So do we.

Voter ratification of Proposal P-24-1 would save the city a lot of wasteful spending and greatly simplify local elections. No offense to any City Council or mayoral candidate, but their service isn’t worth a $750,000 low-turnout runoff election.

And there’s no logical reason to ask Gianna Rahmer, Nichole Rogers or anyone else to run the same race twice.