Diary Of A Mad Voter: Heath Haussamen

The New Mexico Caucus Debacle

By Heath Haussamen, 2-13-08

Elections should be run by governments. The debacle that was last week’s New Mexico Democratic caucus makes that clear.

It’s not the record voter turnout and the resulting long lines that bother me. That’s a great problem to have. What calls into question the integrity of the vote is the Democratic Party of New Mexico’s difficulty in responding to the high voter turnout, the weak protection for the ballots and the fact that a party-run caucus isn’t subject to state election law.

As it stands, Hillary Clinton has a 1,074-vote lead in New Mexico, with 68,084 votes to Barack Obama’s 67,010 votes, but more than 17,000 provisional ballots are still being considered. Final results aren’t expected until Friday - 10 days after Democrats voted.

County clerks and the secretary of state have the staffers and equipment to prepare for and respond to high voter turnout. The party, on the other hand, was underfunded and, in some places, short on volunteers, so it was overwhelmed, especially at polling places in the Albuquerque area, when 153,000 people showed up to vote statewide. At some polling places, ballots had to be photocopied.

Government-run elections have security measures in place, including state police officers to guard ballot boxes. The party’s system, on the other hand, was woefully inadequate. After polling-location volunteers counted ballots, managers called in the results to the state party. In Rio Arriba County and some other places, the ballots then spent the night in the privacy of the managers’ homes.

The ballots were recounted the next day, when the state party recovered them, to ensure the number the polling manager gave over the phone matched the ballots in the box. But that’s a pretty weak check. It wouldn’t take much for a rogue manager to cheat.

To top it off, because party-run caucuses aren’t subject to state elections law, there would be no serious penalty for cheating.

The Democratic presidential candidates have been asking voters to get fired up. A record number did that last week in New Mexico, with many putting aside their cynicism to vote for the first time in years or for the first time ever. Since Tuesday, several have told me they’re discouraged because, with all the problems, they aren’t certain their votes will be counted.

Some sound more jaded than they were before they decided to put aside their cynicism and vote last week.

Lt. Gov. Diane Denish wrote last week in an e-mail to supporters that the high turnout “proves democracy is alive and well - and that it only thrives when people are willing to do their part.”

This is certainly not democracy thriving. There was a wave of increased interest, but this negative experience could further jade many of the cynics who hadn’t voted in a long time before Tuesday, and could make them less likely to vote next time. In the end, the caucus was a disservice to the state’s Democrats.

That’s not the fault of the caucus volunteers, who did their best in a system that was bound to crumble under such impressive turnout. They should be commended for volunteering their time to help democracy work.

But the state has done a lot to reform its government elections process in recent years, including switching to paper ballots. Democrats should let state and county elections professionals run their primaries. Though some of those professionals don’t always do the best job of ensuring elections have integrity, on the whole, they do much better than this.

Editor’s note: Heath Haussamen’s weekly blogs are part of NewWest.Net/Politics’ “Diary of a Mad Voter” feature, a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. For more columns check in with www.newwest.net/madvoter. And for more information on each of the bloggers, click here.

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