New Mexico Voter List Mystery Deepens

Posted by Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet at 5:31 PM on February 8, 2008.

The mystery of what went wrong in New Mexico’s Super Tuesday Democratic Caucus deepened on Friday. Party officials on background said they absolutely were given a bad voter list from the Secretary of State – whose spokesman, in turn, defended the database prepared by ES&S, one of the nation’s large private election vendors.

Meanwhile, election experts watching the New Mexico debacle, where the Democratic Party underestimated voter turnout, consolidated precincts – causing confusion and long lines - and is now verifying and counting 17,000 provisional ballots, are not sure if those conditions alone, or a bad voter list, or both, was to blame for the nation’s highest rate of issuing provisional ballots in years.

Either way, the ongoing story is a cautionary tale for what not to do in November’s presidential election.

First, the voter list controversy: A New Mexico Democratic Party official involved in running the caucus reached out on Friday morning hoping to dispel “misinformation” about Tuesday’s vote. The official, who absolutely was in a position to know what happened, said the party used a voter database provided by the Secretary of State. Democrats assumed that list was fine until about an hour before the voting started Tuesday, when some county officials called and said their names were missing.

Apparently, those missing names, the official said, lead to many voters receiving provisional ballots, which is the fail-safe means of having people vote by later verifying their registration information before counting their ballot. The party is now calling county clerks across New Mexico and asking them to pull voter registration cards – one at a time – to verify the provisional ballots. The party made mistakes in running the caucus, the official said, but that paled in comparison to using a voter list with missing names.

“I have a CD of your list – and it’s a bad list, buddy,” was their comment.

Next, the repeated denial from the Secretary of State’s office: James Flores, the spokesman for New Mexico Secretary of State Mary Herrera, a Democrat, was quick to dismiss any criticism of his office’s voter registration data. When told of the comment by the state party official, he said, “That’s somebody’s opinion. Anyone can say that and start a firestorm.” Stepping back, Flores agreed that one New Mexico county’s voters indeed was missing from the statewide list prepared by ES&S (Election Systems and Software). But that significant omission was discovered and fixed, he said.

“If that was a bad list the county clerks would be inundating us with phone calls,” Flores said, “but we haven’t gotten any calls.”

When told of that reply, the party official said, “Of course, they’re going to say that!”

Moreover, that official said there was no reason for county clerks to be calling the Secretary of State’s office because the clerks weren’t running the caucus: the Democratic Party was. Patricia Leahan, director of the Las Vegas (New Mexico) Peace and Justice Center, and a voting rights activist, said Flores’ reply was not a very good answer.

“I know that citizens had called the Secretary of State’s office and complained,” Leahan said, “Isn’t that good enough?”

The bottom line is not who will get New Mexico’s last Democratic delegate in 2008, potentially swinging the state into the victory column for Clinton or Obama. Rather, it is the still-unanswered question, ‘Was the state using a bad voter list provided by a private vendor – instead of using data compiled by public officials?’

Five other states also have hired ES&S to compile statewide voter lists: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas and Nebraska, according to ElectionLine.org, which tracks voting industry trends. Meanwhile, other states have had problems with vendors hired to compile their voter lists. The statewide lists are a requirement under the Help America Vote Act. In Colorado, Wisconsin and Wyoming, Accenture either missed deadlines, paid fines or was fired, according to ElectionLine.org.

“It highlights some of the potential pitfalls of some states implementing statewide voter registration databases this year,” said Tova Andrea Wang, an election expert with The Century Foundation. “They have now been warned that this could be a problem.”

Ellen Theisen, managing editor of VotersUnite.org, which tracks election issues from a grassroots perspective better than any other website in the country, said New Mexico’s experience underscores that all election functions need to be run by the public sector. (The Democratic Party straddles the fence between a private and a public entity.) She also said voter lists need to be maintained from the local level up – not the other way around, where officials in the state capital or working for out-of-state companies are responsible for tracking who registers to vote, who moves and who dies.

“It’s a huge job,” Theisen said. “Given the ways the Democratic Party ended up bungling this, it highlights how much of a good job election officials do – much of the time.”