As local elections near, push to register more voters launches
Early voting begins in October for municipal, school board races
With early voting about to begin for municipal and school board elections in Santa Fe and other communities in the state, the League of Women Voters of Santa Fe County will operate two voter registration sites Tuesday.
The registration drive coincides with National Voter Registration Day, a 7-year-old effort to increase participation in elections in a nation where just under half the eligible population turned out to vote last year and about 60 percent cast ballots in the last presidential election.
In Santa Fe, the league will have tables at Whole Foods Market and the DeVargas Center mall.
Absentee voting for the upcoming election begins Oct. 8. Early in-person voting for Santa Fe city councilors and school board members begins on Oct. 19. Election Day is Nov. 5.
Before this year, school board elections and municipal elections in New Mexico were held separately, with the municipal races being decided in March of the same years as general elections.
However, in 2016 the state Supreme Court ruled that various election reforms approved by voters in the form of constitutional amendments would have to be implemented by the Legislature.
As a result, school districts no longer were prohibited from holding elections at the same time as other nonpartisan elections for offices such as mayor and city councilor.
The consolidation of local, nonpartisan elections is just one change in recent years designed to encourage voting. Others include allowing voting at any convenience center on Election Day and allowing voters to register on the same day they vote, which was signed into law this year.
For many years, residents getting a New Mexico driver’s license have been able to register at Motor Vehicle Division field offices. Pino said 76,315 people were registered through the MVD between the end of last year and the end of August. That number is expected to rise because this year a law mandating automatic registration at Motor Vehicle Departments — with an option to decline — was signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
The ban on holding school elections at the same time as other nonpartisan elections dated to 1910. A state constitution adopted that year limited voting to men, except for school elections. Though women won the right to vote in all elections when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, the state provision on separating school elections survived until this year.
Meredith Machen of Santa Fe, a longtime League of Women Voters leader, said Friday this was a “holdover from efforts to keep women out of politics.”
National Voter Registration Day, says a league website, is “a national holiday celebrating our democracy.
“Every year millions of Americans find themselves unable to vote because they miss a registration deadline, don’t update their registration, or aren’t sure how to register,” the website says. “National Voter Registration Day seeks to create broad awareness of voter registration opportunities to reach tens of thousands of voters who may not register otherwise.”
New Mexico had about 1.27 million registered voters at the end of 2018, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. That number grew slightly by the end of February, then fell by nearly 33,000 by the end of March after a purge of voter rolls.
Voter numbers in the state experience serious drops every two years, Deputy Secretary of State Sharon Pino said Friday, because “There is a voter cancellation process codified in the election code, which is used by election officials to maintain up-to-date voter registration lists in conformance with the federal National Voter Registration Act.”
In New Mexico, Pino said, county clerks are directed to cancel voter registrations due to change of residence by the March following a general election.
Since the purge in March, the number of registered voters has increased every month. The latest available figures show that at the end of August the number was 1,257,367. Of those 45.6 percent are registered as Democrats while 30.2 percent registered as Republicans. This is about the same partisan split as the end of last year. The remainder of voters are registered “declined to state” (22.3 percent) or as members of minor parties (less than 2 percent).
Kelly Davis, who chairs voter registration efforts for the League of Women Voters of Santa Fe County, said Saturday that in addition to recent changes in state law, her group supports proposals for online voting, which she said 17 states allow, and a “well-funded, year-round, professionally conducted publicity campaign promoting voting and detailing each of these laws.”