Council to meet at south-side library
Report slated on election night issues with ranked-choice voting
If you go to City Hall for Wednesday’s City Council meeting, you’ll be in the wrong place.
Both the afternoon and evening sessions of the council’s regular meeting this week are being held across town at the Southside Branch Library, 6599 Jaguar Drive.
It’s not the first time the council has met in a location other than City Hall. But in the past, the council has chosen alternate venues such as high school gymnasiums to accommodate large crowds seeking to participate in discussions of controversial issues. This time the move was prompted by newly elected District 3 Councilor Roman “Tiger” Abeyta, who wanted to bring city government closer to south-side residents who sometimes feel left out of council affairs.
“It’s bring the government closer to people who might not want to drive all the way downtown,” city spokesman Matt Ross said Tuesday. “It’s putting the council on your corner.”
Unlike other venues that have hosted City Council meetings — the downtown convention center or the Toby Roybal Gym at Santa Fe High School — the library actually has a smaller capacity. Ross said the meeting room will have space for 90 people, which is more people than normally attend council meetings. But just in case, there will be an “overflow” room.
“The agenda is what tends to drive attendance,” Ross said. “We’re hoping with this light agenda there will be plenty of room for people in the area to come and participate in their city government.”
Perhaps the most interesting item on Wednesday’s agenda is a report by Ross and City Clerk Yolanda Vigil on what worked and didn’t work with Santa Fe’s new ranked-choice voting system for municipal elections. The new system was used for the first time here in the the March 6 city election.
According to a report by Ross and Vigil, “The obvious disappointment on Election Night was the long delay before results were available,” the memo said. “Winners were not announced until approximately 11:45 pm.”
A major problem, the report says, had to do with laws governing how ballots are handled.
“Staff identified laws that very strictly govern the chain of custody of the cards,” the report says. “The same person tasked with getting the cards back to City Hall must first complete the full process of closing down their voting center. They reconcile the number of ballots cast to the number of ballots issued, the number of
permits printed, and the number of spoiled ballots; print and verify the paper tapes from each machine; and fill out reports to formally document turnout and results. In some voting centers this takes longer than others, but the speed of the results is necessarily dictated by the pace at the slowest center.
“Because of these requirements, and because it takes longer to close some voting centers than others, the final results could only be tabulated when the last card was delivered to City Hall. Once all the cards were in, the actual computation of results was completed in a matter of minutes.”
Vigil and Ross suggest changes in state and local laws and policies to allow the presiding judge at each location to be able to “get their data into the hands of ‘deputized’ officials, who could bring it back to City Hall while the presiding judge continues shutdown procedures.”
Another problem was that “large number of voters were concentrated at relatively few sites,” the report says. This could be remedied by a major push to encourage early voting and providing more early-voting centers. In this election there were only two. Just under 40 percent of the vote this year came from early and absentee voters.
Also contributing to the slowness of counting the votes was the fact that nine ballots — out of more than 20,000 cast — for various reasons couldn’t be read by the tabulation machines.
“Neither city nor state election code lay out procedures for handling such ballots in a ranked choice election,” the report says. “… On Election Day, the Secretary of State identified and city election staff implemented a process of re-marking these ballots, under observation and on film, so they could be counted on a voting machine with a data card. The process took time and resources away from other priorities and, in one instance, delayed the close-out of an absentee voting machine past 7:00 pm.”
The report suggests changes in the election code by the Legislature or the Secretary of State’s Office or a city ordinance to set procedures for ballots that can’t be read by machines.