The good news: New Mexico now votes on paper ballots, since their touch-screen debacle in the 2004 Presidential Election left Gov. Bill Richardson with little legal choice but to move to paper.
The bad news: The huge turnout in yesterday’s Democratic Primary led to long lines, voters who found they were no longer on the registration rolls for some still-unexplained reason, 17,000 votes had to be cast on provisional ballots which remain uncounted today, and now it’s being reported — incredibly — that at least three ballot boxes were kept overnight last night, uncounted, at the home of a Democratic County Party Chairwoman.
What makes it all worse, as if all that is not troubling enough, is that the current razor-thin margin between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the caucus stands at just 217 votes out of 136 thousand ballots cast.
The governor’s apologizing, the party is prevaricating, the candidates’ representatives are negotiating, and, as usual, it’s the voters who are left hanging, wondering if their voices will actually be heard…
We were were just a guest on Santa Fe’s Public Radio station, KSFR, discussing that issue and other problems around the country. We’ll post audio here when we can get it.
UPDATE: Here’s that audio. We’re on for the first 15 minutes or so, followed by Susan Greenhalgh of VoterAction.org, speaking about Super Tuesday problems with DREs around the country. Appx 30 mins in full. Download MP3, or listen online here…
Governor Bill Richardson has issued a statement today, saying “I am deeply disturbed by the reports that problems and delays at polling locations may have kept people from voting.”
Over on Albuquerque’s Public Radio station, KUNM, this afternoon, San Miguel County Clerk Paul Maes said of the voters who showed up, only to find they were not on the registration rolls for some reason, “We verified most of them, and they were in our system, but for some reason they didn’t appear on the roster for the caucus.”
KUNM reported that Maes’ office “got calls from whole neighborhoods of Democrats who were on his list of eligible voters but were asked to use provisional ballots” and that they are “not sure where the Democratic Party got its list.”
The Democratic Party in New Mexico runs its own caucus.
The report (transcript posted in full at end of this article) goes on to suggest that the voter list comes from the Secretary of State, who contracts out the maintenance of the voter registration rolls (again, incredibly enough) to voting machine company ES&S.
As to the ballot boxes kept uncounted overnight at the home of a Democratic Party Official, Democracy for New Mexico points us to this report from NM political reporter Heath Haussamen, who writes today:
“The site managers locked them and they kept them and they took them to my wife this morning,” Nash quoted Richard Martinez as saying.
State party officials and Theresa Martinez have not returned my calls seeking comment.
The three ballot boxes from Rio Arriba County and a fourth from Sandoval County account for the 2 percent of precincts that haven’t yet reported results from Tuesday’s caucus. With about 200 votes separating Clinton and Barack Obama, that’s huge. We’re talking about the ballots from half the polling places in Rio Arriba County.
I want to make sure this point is emphasized: Roughly half the votes from Rio Arriba County spent the night in the privacy of the home or homes of one or more election officials in boxes those officials may have had the ability to open. All the county party chair had to do last night to report the results was make a phone call. That never happened.
Though we shouldn’t, by now, be amazed by such stories, we continue to be. It looks like quite a few folks have some ‘splainin’ to do in New Mexico. Again.
We recommend Democracy for New Mexico’s excellent continuing coverage for following this story.
Thanks to Election Defense Alliance’s Theron Horton for the transcript from Jim William’s KUNM report on the questions surrounding the use of some 17,000 provisional ballots yesterday. That transcript follows in full below…
Jim Williams: Seventeen thousand. That’s the number of provisional ballots issued in the New Mexico Democratic presidential preference caucus on Tuesday. Some of the reasons for that relatively high number were likely weather, confusion over voting locations, and confusion over just what a Democratic presidential preference caucus actually is. Some polling locations saw Republicans and Independents, who weren’t eligible to vote in the caucus, showing up and trying anyway. But another issue entirely is registered Democrats who showed up and couldn’t vote on regular ballots.
Paul Maes: We verified most of them, and they were in our system, but for some reason they didn’t appear on the roster for the caucus.
Williams: Paul Maes is San Miguel County Clerk. He says his office got calls from whole neighborhoods of Democrats who were on his list of eligible voters but were asked to use provisional ballots. He says he’s not sure where the Democratic Party got its list.
Maes: I know they didn’t get it from us. It has to be the secretary of state’s office or ES&S, which is the”¦the main system is the, I guess they contract out with ES&S to maintain voter registration.
Williams: Maes says there are just three entities that can provide voter lists for elections”¦county clerks, the secretary of state’s office, and Election Systems and Software, or ES&S.
Maes: I just don’t know where they pulled the file from, if it was from the secretary of state or from ES&S, or even if they used an old one. But there was a lot of discrepancies in the list that they provided to each polling place.
Fran Hanhardt: We did have phone calls from voters who were concerned about the registration and the way we had it in our office.
Williams: Fran Hanhardt is San Juan County Clerk.
Hanhardt: In exploring the records that we have in our office, we determined that in fact they were registered, and should, and were registered at the precinct where they showed up, at the consolidated precinct where they showed up to vote, and should have been on that list.
Williams: Hanhardt says if the Democratic Party used a list that was older than 20 days or so, that could have been the problem.
Hanhardt: Because we were making changes in voter registrations for people who, in fact, changed their registrations the day the books closed, which was 28 days prior to their election, so in our records those people would have shown up on those rosters, um, but they did not show up on the Democratic Party rosters that were presented at the precincts.
Williams: But James Flores, spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, says the list did come through the state’s Elections Bureau, overseen by the secretary of state. And it is possible that Election Systems and Software was involved with the list.
James Flores: The information compiled here at the secretary of state’s office is the same information that each of the individual county clerks has. We kind of serve as a, for lack of a better phrase, we serve as a hub for all that information. The last time it was uh, information, updated information was sent, was approximately the 24th of last month.
Williams: But Hanhardt says it concerns her that there are discrepancies between what she has and what the state has.
Hanhardt: If my list shows a voter as being qualified as a voter, then I take offense to the fact that when that voter shows up to vote at a polling place, that he’s not given the opportunity to vote in a standard measure. I, but I can’t control how they got their list. I can only assure that voter that my records are correct, and if the list had been printed from my records, that they would have been on that list.
Williams: Flores says the secretary of state’s office wants to hear from county clerks who saw discrepancies in Tuesday’s Democratic caucus.
Flores: Uh, they haven’t contacted our office, we would need to find out what they’re talking about”¦uh”¦what voters they’re talking about. I know that if there was a just a recent change right before election time, um, there’s a file that they call a suspense file”¦and what it does is that uh, it may not have all the current information but it will still allow the voter to vote, but it’s very likely they will have to vote provisional. And then of course their vote would count once everything has been verified.
Williams: San Miguel County Clerk Paul Maes says the high numbers of provisional ballots combined with a new system of handling them this time was likely one of the reasons for the long, slow voting lines at polling locations around the state. So if discrepancies between voter lists led to more provisional ballots, they may have also led to some voters deciding the wait wasn’t worth it, which happened in polling places across the state. The state Democratic Party hadn’t responded to requests for comment on this story at the time of broadcast. For KUNM, I’m Jim Williams.
UPDATE 2/7/08 1:27pm PT: More details on the absurdly long lines, and voters turned away Tuesday in the Democratic Party-run Caucus here.
UPDATE 2/7/08 2:08pm PT: Jim Williams of KUNM writes to send us this additional information:
Since posting this story originally, we’ve been barraged by registered Democrats writing in from NM to say that they either couldn’t vote, due to long lines, or found that they were not on the registration rolls when they finally got to the table.
The most notable take-away from this story may end up not being the poorly run caucus process of the Democratic Party (as opposed to the state, who would run the general election in November), or even the “sleepover” ballot boxes. The most notable issue here may be the questions about what the hell happened to the registration rolls in New Mexico, as now maintained by the thugs and failures at voting machine company ES&S, since the last election.
Remember, NM is where former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired because he refused to prosecute the bogus “voter fraud” charges made by the Republican Party there.
UPDATE 2/7/08 2:31pm PT: ALL ballots in NM’s Democratic Caucus will now be recounted, according to NPR…
New Mexico apportions its delegates, so Obama and Clinton will each end up with a share of the 26 delegates at stake. And with the national race so close, each delegate counts.
There is no prediction of when the recount will be completed.
UPDATE 2/8/07 8:06pm PT: NPR’s report was wrong. Only “qualified provisional ballots” will be counted. But, more disturbingly, the ES&S fingerprints on the voter roll problems becomes more apparent. Please see this update…
Oy! We can put a man on the moon, but can’t develop a system for fair and secure elections? Just like that collapsed bridge in Minnesota, our voting infrastructure needs to be rebuilt.
In other news, the GOP are quaking in their boots because of their fraudulent behavior coming to light:
http://www.politico.com/news/st...0208/8349.html
He who gives life to fear, dies by fear. And it couldn’t happen to a cockier gang of sociopaths.
– Tom
I guess it hasn’t gotten through to the politicos -OR they know that the corruption is so endemic and inherent to the system that the odds of them getting caight and meaningfully prosecuted is minimal- that the people have stopped looking the other way.
Yeah, Duke Cunningham got put away, but what of those implicated by Sibel Edmunds whose crimes actually dwarf Cunningham’s?
I find it odd that the NM totals that have been up for most of the day (Feb. 6) on CNN.com show 66,173 for Clinton and 65,963 for Obama (98% reporting), which gives a difference of 210 votes, while the latest Statewide Totals from the NM Democratic Party (http://www.nmdemocrats.org/ht/d...ails/i/1129743) released at 8:28 PM MST (183 of 184 precincts reporting) show Clinton with 66,278 versus 65,243 for Obama (a difference of 1,035 votes). I haven’t been following the count at this site except to compare it now to the numbers I’ve been seeing for hours from CNN.
Does this latest update reflect the ballots that were kept under questionable watch?
And how is it that the more recent count actually shows less votes for Obama than were reported earlier (at least by CNN)?
I’m wondering whether or not the Statewide Totals include the Absentee Ballot Totals (currently shown as 1,643 for Clinton versus 1,586 for Obama)?
Vote counting mess in primaries, caucuses and general elections for both dems and repugs … makes you wonder:
– who is in charge
– why are they motivated to keep free and fair elections from happening
– when will anything be done to eliminate election fraud from this country
good luck with all that
bend over america cuz we’re all getting screwed; except those who are doing the screwing, that is.
I just compiled the latest info on the NM Caucus here.
The CNN exit poll also does not agree with the results reported so far:
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/200...dex.html#NMDEM
The exit poll shows women, who made up 56% of the voters, split evenly 47% to 47% for Clinton and Obama. The exit poll also shows that men, who were 44% of the voters, voted in favor of Obama 53% to 39% for Clinton. Doing the simple math on these numbers gives Obama 49.6% versus 43.5% for Clinton, or roughly a 6% margin in favor of Obama.
I suppose a draw or slight edge for Clinton may still be within the margin of error for this exit poll?
You must add those absentee totals to the Statewide total to get the number of votes reported thus far.
The last precinct still unreported was the precinct in Rio Rancho where about 6000 people showed up to vote. I voted at that precinct first thing and it already had a line. But later in the after (roughly 3 pm it was already a 2 hour wait. By the time 5 pm rolled around it was a 3 hour wait.)
Why should any party official who has endorsed a candidate be allowed to take home ballots? Even if none were altered, the taint of suspicion is there–along with temptation.
What happens to all those provisional ballots kept overnight? Will they be counted? And how can anyone vouch for the accuracy?
#7 — Thanks, that makes sense and certainly answers the question I had about the total count. And thanks for posting the details from the local scene.
suspicious list of oddities, not making comlete sense, clues?
here is the short list of suspicious, unexplained developments……
(plan on doing a comprehensive fact gathering post on this potential scandal, and big, big thans to the BB, for your invaluable efforts, also beginning to monitor fight the net operation against obama?)
– after Obama stuns in conservative caucus state Iowa
– he loses in more progressive state New Hampshire when pre election polls showed him with a significant lead
– he is doing better in caucuses than states with the nasty secret vote counting devices
– he wins alot of states on super tuesday in the south and midwest, the only way Clinton can keep up is to take the largest states, and walla, she does! NY and CA
-when hours before the vote in CA a Rueters/C-span/Zogby poll showed
Obama up 49-36! with 3% margin of error, those threee organizations that did the poll are highly reputable
-over 700,000 votes in LA alone may not have been counted because of a new butterfly ballot the double bubble (I’ll put links to all this in a new vote manipulation clues post)
– and AGAIN after Obama wins more conservative states in the south and midwest, he loses California? after high powered endorsements from Oprah, Ethel Kennedy and even California’s First Lady!
-and finally a Hispanic newspaper man on NPR today made sure to point out, he was baffled and never saw before the Hispanic vote doing different things, going contrasting ways in different states, (I’ll try to find out what he was referring to, I either missed it or he did not elaborate)
TIA’s exit poll report: http://www.progressiveindepende...opic_id=3801#4
Yesterday, my mother and I went to vote at 4:PM at the Adobe Acres Elementary School. The parking lot next to the building was blocked off which was a problem because I’m using a walker due to a foot injury. I ignored the fence and went around to park in the Handy Cap parking area anyway. Only two were available and thank God my Mother has a HC parking pass so we were legal. We both went inside and were informed that there were two lines. One for last names beginning with the letters A-L and the other line for last names beginning with the letters M-Z. Whomever thought of this bright idea needs to resign because the M-Z line was at least twice as long. After waiting 5 minutes it was apparent we would not be able to vote for at least 2 hours. Unable to stand on my injured foot for that duration it was apparent that I had to leave. Before we left I complained to an official and told him their “system” was not working. He replied that he knew it and they were trying to do the best they could. Because I was unable to vote I have now entered the ranks of disenchanted voters, there are millions of us.
Trust the NM Dem Party? – NOT!
Take a look at what the NM Dems do to themselves. They don’t like newcomers.
http://www.democracyfornewmexic...and_photo.html
http://newmexicomatters.blogs.c...emocratic.html
An Undemocratic Election: Taos County Precinct 21
What Tommy Tafoya doesn’t want you to know about the precinct election
in Talpa:
Twenty four of the 67 ballots cast at the Precinct 21 election in
Talpa had the first name written on the ballot crossed out and a different
name entered.
Only 3 of those 24 had matching handwriting for both names written on
the ballot. For the other 21 ballots, one person wrote the name on the
ballot – and then someone else crossed that off and wrote in a different
name.
Sixteen of the twenty-four changed ballots were written in the same
handwriting.
Six names did not appear on the voter rolls, but voted in the election
anyhow. Of those, two were registered to vote in a different precinct,
and three were not registered as Democrats.
A challenge to this crooked election was blocked from even being heard
at the Credentials Committee meeting.
(the pictures of the forged ballots appear to be gone from that post, but they are available elsewhere)
Don’t think it is an accident..Bill Richardson worked for Clinton.Every state corporate Hill wins in , there are many irregularities.Read a comment on DU that Hill approached S.C. election officials to hack the vote and she was turned down. Seems from TV spots Obama is drawing much bigger crowds.Also read on DU ..friend of commenter worked for Hill in Iowa… said early on, she would be lucky to come in 2nd or 3rd.
The shame of custody returns. As does my pointing out that having paper ballots is useless without an adult chain of custody.
Everywhere I look there are discrepancies. Except for one thing … kos and election officials tend to say “what problems?”
As far as polls being wrong or off the mark from the results, that is a good thing. People shouldn’t be swayed by polls but should make a decision on their own, using their brain. Thats a major problem with caucus’. You may vote a certain way just to be able to sit or stand in line with your buddy and of course, you don’t want to be accused of being racist or sexist. As far as voter rolls go, here in Florida, purging of voter rolls is still going on and we had 1.5 million voters choose a candidate, only to be told by our own party that we aren’t being counted. Thats one and a half MILLION votes. As far as candidates not campaigning here, we saw plenty of Obama commercials on TV here. The date of the primary was moved by our Republican Legislature. America being screwed again.
It is very strange that The governor Richardson and the ex president Bill Clinton. Watched the superbowl together. Just be for the election? What did they discuss? Support for Hillary by holding back the voting ballets? Just asking?
Re: “Why should any party official who has endorsed a candidate be allowed to take home ballots?”
No one, regardless of whether they are political or not, is EVER allowed to take home ballots!!! Furthermore, it is against ALL ballot handling procedures for there EVER to be only one person in possession of ballots.
Those NM ballots need to be investigated for having been altered, and the person who took them home needs to go to jail.
NM (and the rest of the country, for that matter) now finds itself in a situation in which the right of the voters who cast their votes on those ballots has to be weighed against the integrity of the ballots. No matter what NM decides to do with the ballots, at least one individual needs to go to jail.
Dear Mr. Brad…this is the first time I have ever posted, but you talk about election fraud. At one of the other sites they made a big thing about the support for obama at southern Minnesota. Well why not.
Did you know it was a caucus and how they are manipulated. Well in all the polls Hillary lead obama up to the next day after the voting. So why didn’t all the people who supported Hillary get to vote, senior citizens.
For the first time in caucusing, the DFL combined the places to caucus. Some people showing up to the caucus found they had been moved some as far as 50 miles away. And they didn’t know. No transportation either, remember this is rural MN and if you don’t have a car you are out of luck. This is just one of the crooked, ways some of these caucus were manipulated for obama. Who showed up the young bunch with cars. Seniors didn’t have a chance.
The problem is these party officials in New Mexico are not unbiased and are probably Hillary supporters.
Where the f’ is the FBI during all this?! Can’t they smell f’ing election fraud?! Why are they just sitting on their f’ing faces? This isn’t just a failure on the part of our elected officials, it’s a failure on the part of law enforcement! All they need to do is frog march one of these bastards in front of a bank of television cameras, and I guarantee this crap will come to and end. Or, at least it will slow enough to give someone a chance to fix this system.
What bastards! Everywhere. Law enforcement appears to be complacent in all of it.
They are busy with other things. HA HA
And people wonder why folks don’t vote (even though so far this primary has had record turnout, if I’m not mistaken). We can fly to the moon, travel to the deepest depths of the ocean, and keep people with serious health conditions alive for years…but we can’t seem to accomplish something like making sure our elections (which are the primary part of the argument for democracy) are secure. Sad, sad, sad.
http://www.livingwithanerd.com
Why are people getting so overheated about this? Delegates are divided based on the proportional vote and the difference between Obama getting another 200 votes or Clinton getting another 200 votes in terms of delegates is not huge.
You really think Clinton supporters would violate the law to get one lousy delegate? But things in perspective. If it were winner take all general election it would be worth it, but fighting about this is a waste of time in the democratic primary.
#23 Cliff
You are missing the point. There is no excuse for the voters having to use the provisional ballots in the first place, but taking home the uncounted provisional ballots for days is unthinkable. It just shows the callousness with which our election officials carry out our elections. Why in the hell would *she* of all people take them home? Why were they delivered to *her*? And why those *particular* boxes from the only areas whose results have not been reported, and can be manipulated? Very suspicious circumstances.
Cliff #23, we can all be thankful that you are not running any state’s elections.
It is highly inaccurate to say that 17,000 people were thrown off the voting rolls and forced to use provisional ballots. I’ve talked with and heard from many caucus site managers and volunteers and the main problems were with people showing up to vote who weren’t registered Democrats or who were at the wrong voting place because the precinct locations were different from their normal polling places.
Many people used provisionals in the Chama area up north because of a snow emergency that resulted in people unable to get to the other sites and everyone voting at a centralized site at the last minute. Also, many provisionals were used to allow people to vote at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe where our 30-day legislative session is currently ongoing. They were used by legislators, staff members and others who work there during the session.
There were some problems with the lists and this needs to be researched and fixed, but most of the provisional ballots were given out for other reasons. I think it’s wrong to exaggerate and claim that 17,000 people were thrown off the voter rolls.
Moreover, the provisionals will be carefully vetted and counted based on negotiations between attorneys for both the Clinton and Obama campaigns as to what the standards should be.
COMMENT #15 [Permalink]
… glennmcgahee said on 2/7/2008 @ 6:24 am PT…
“As far as polls being wrong or off the mark from the results, that is a good thing. People shouldn’t be swayed by polls but should make a decision on their own, using their brain…”
Exit polls have been THE MOST ACCURATE INDICATOR of election results, undisputably, until the year 2000. Since then, they have been abolished altogether (2002), weighted and “adjusted” to match the offical results (2004/ 2006), or just outright discredited altogether to cover up massive fraud (NEW HAMPSHIRE, 2008).
As for Florida, I was made so sick by the DEM DISENFRANCHISEMENT of FL DELAGATES that I traveled to the Dem Party State Convention in October to find out how this could happen/ was horrified with what I learned/ filmed.
You should know that while a REPUBLICAN LEGISLATURE ruled to move back our primaries in direct violation of the DNC bylaws, this was met WITH NO CONTEST OR OBJECTIONS from STATE DEMOCRATIC CHAIR KAREN THURMAN, who, as it turns out, is on the payroll for the STATE REPUBLICAN CHAIR.
My bet is that this was a bi-partisan, collective effort to ensure HILLARY was the FLORIDA nominee. We’ll find out soon enough as this heated race for national delagates continues to “split” between HILLARY and OBAMA; watch for HOWARD DEAN to have MI and FL delagates REINSTATED after so much in-party bickering/ lawsuits/ other candidates scrubbed from the ballot/ barred from campaigning here.
Hope you’re all about HILLARY, cuz five’ll get you ten this race will be decided in her favor by HOWARD DEAN and the DNC.
Jeannie #27 absolutely you are one smart cookie !
Speaking about Karen Thurman, I was going to say something about LaPore but then I saw this…shes been hammered enough
Link
Thanks and Backatcha, Floridiot! We simply must get together one of these days for coffee and decompression…maybe bowling and beer would be better.