Luján: Extend absentee voting deadline
Congressman running for Senate concerned some have not received ballots in mail
U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján is urging Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver to extend the deadline for turning in absentee ballots in the face of previous mail delays.
In a statement issued by his office Wednesday, Luján, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House, said his office has even heard reports of “some ballots that are missing altogether.” That claim is unsubstantiated, according to Toulouse Oliver’s office.
Alex Curtas, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office, said extending the deadline would require a change in law. Only the Legislature has the power to change the election code, and there is no session pending before Tuesday’s primary. But it is still possible for a last-minute court challenge to make an emergency request to extend the deadline.
“If [Toulouse Oliver] had the authority, she’d definitely be considering it at this point,” Curtas said of pushing back
the deadline. “So it is worth considering as a policy going forward, definitely. A lot of other states do it.”
He added that he has “no knowledge or indication that there were … missing ballots of some kind.”
A campaign staffer for Luján’s U.S. Senate run later clarified that the “missing ballots” claim refers to ballots that have not yet been received by voters.
The request to push back the deadline comes as many say they are still waiting to receive their absentee ballots with only three business days before the primary election.
The Luján U.S. Senate campaign “has heard directly from at least 20 people who have not received absentee ballots that they requested,” the campaign wrote in a follow-up email.
Meanwhile, at least 33 people at The Montecito, a senior living facility in Santa Fe, were registered to vote a month ago, requested an absentee ballot and have not yet received one, said Margaret Detwiler, a 75-year-old resident there who said she has been active in trying to help other residents through the frustrating process.
Detwiler said she has waited nearly two months since sending in her absentee ballot request March 31 and still has not received her ballot. She and others at Montecito also have faced problems with the online voter registration system mistakenly saying they’re not registered to vote, including Detwiler herself, who has been registered to vote in Santa Fe for 12 years.
The problem with the voter registration list even resulted in one resident at Montecito being turned away from an in-person early voting location and having to come back the next day, Detwiler said. Retirement communities are among the most at-risk populations for developing serious COVID-19 cases.
“I don’t know what to do,” Detwiler said. “People have tried calling the county clerk’s office. If you can leave a message, you don’t get a call back. Most of the time the mailboxes are full. And I know they’re frantic; I certainly understand that. I wish somebody’d look under a few tables at the post office.”
Santa Fe County Clerk Geraldine Salazar acknowledged there have been problems at the senior living facility. She said there was a discrepancy in the entire 103rd precinct, where the retirement community is located, between the county’s voter registration list and the list from a vendor the country contracted to assist in mailing absentee ballots during the unprecedented surge.
Salazar said the county has received 52 applications for absentee ballots from Montecito and has delivered 35 ballots. She said she doesn’t doubt there have been problems with the online voter registration list.
“This is a massive system and that’s all I can say,” Salazar said. “We will check our files. We’ll double- and triple-check. My staff will go into the system and check it out.”
Meanwhile, for those who have received ballots, some are reporting 12 days between requesting a ballot and it being marked as “returned” by their county clerk’s office, the Luján campaign said.
Despite the Secretary of State’s Office lacking the legal authority, Luján said Toulouse Oliver must take action “to ensure that all voices are safely heard by extending the deadline for counting ballots.”
Santa Fe resident Jen Schwartz said in a community Facebook group Wednesday that she requested an absentee ballot online May 1 and still has not received it.
“As of today, nothing. I just called and they said that it was too late now to do anything. I have to do early voting or vote on election day. I’m so irritated and was wondering if anyone else has had the same experience,” Schwartz wrote.
Other states have pushed back their primary elections or absentee ballot deadlines. In Idaho, the state delayed its March primary to June 2. A county in Pennsylvania has gone to court seeking to push back the state’s deadline for counting absentee ballots by mail, and similar lawsuits have been filed in Michigan and Montana.
The U.S. Supreme Court in April refused to extend the absentee voting deadline in Wisconsin’s primary after a similar request.
Currently, absentee ballots will be counted up until the deadline of 7 p.m. Tuesday. But those ballots must be received by that date and time. Ballots that are postmarked but do not arrive at a county clerk’s office or a polling location before that deadline will not be counted under state law.
Elections officials already have seen an unprecedented surge in absentee ballot applications ahead of the primary election as many seek to protect themselves from possible exposure to COVID-19.
Most county clerks across the state had asked the New Mexico Supreme Court to allow absentee ballots to be automatically sent to registered primary voters without an application first being submitted. The high court said that is not allowed under state law. Instead, justices required that absentee ballot applications be mailed to voters.
As of Wednesday morning, close to 300,000 people statewide had requested absentee ballots. Between in-person and absentee early voting, 149,155 people in New Mexico had already voted, according to data from the Secretary of State’s Office.
But elections officials saw delays in mailing out absentee ballots they previously said could exacerbate the potential for a last-minute flood and delay timely results in close primary races on election night.
Curtas said those delays were mostly in the beginning because of a surge in applications. He added that those hiccups might not have occurred if the court had granted the requests to mail ballots in the first place.
About 360 polling locations will be open for in-person voting Tuesday, state Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto, D-Albuquerque, said earlier in May. Ivey-Soto, an attorney, provides legal assistance to county clerks preparing for the unprecedented election.
Ivey-Soto said Wednesday he agreed that Toulouse Oliver would not be able to delay the absentee ballot deadline without court intervention.
“If someone else takes it to court and gets a ruling applicable statewide, then that will be the law. … But until then, we follow the law that is,” Ivey-Soto said.