No doubt this is precisely the sort of thing that Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, chair of the Republican Governors Association and 2016 Republican Presidential hopeful, was talking about last week when discussing the need for Republicans to be in charge of the “voting mechanisms” in 2016.
New Mexico, certain to be a key swing state once again in the 2016 Presidential election, currently has both a Republican Governor, the popular Susana Martinez, and a Republican Secretary of State, Dianna Duran. Both are up for re-election this year. Duran is in a neck-and-neck race against her Democratic opponent Maggie Toulouse Oliver.
Duran is one of those GOP “voter fraud” fraudsters who likes to pretend there is a massive epidemic of voter fraud that needs correcting via polling place Photo ID restrictions, even though such measures prevent far more legal (largely Democratic-leaning) votes from being cast than fraudulent ones — and even though she’s been able to find next to none since taking office four years ago.
At the same time, Duran appears to be slow-walking thousands of perfectly legal new voter registrations from being processed by the state Motor Vehicle Department (MVD), despite a 2010 court order issued after a settlement with the federal government requiring New Mexico to comply with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the so-called “Motor Voter” law.
On Monday, the Santa Fe New Mexican offered this distressing report from Brian Sweeney, a state voter, or, at least, someone who has been trying to be one for months without success…
Sweeney goes on to recount that calls to the Secretary of State’s office have gone nowhere. His paperwork appears to simply have been “lost”, along with his right to vote this year. And he’s hardly the only one, as he explains…
With electronic and paper registration barriers in place, voter registration has suffered immensely. In New Mexico’s most populous county, Bernalillo County, MVD voter registration is down 90 percent in 2014. In the 10 months since its implementation, that means the Motor Voter system has failed to register 2,230 New Mexicans in Bernalillo County alone.
Reports indicate that the secretary of state has been aware of this issue since April, but has done nothing to fix the problem.
So, to recap: MVD is losing paper voter registration forms, violates state and federal law with a non-functional Motor Voter system, is doing so on a scale that will likely affect a significant portion of the electorate, and the person in charge of elections in this state has known about the issue for six months but has not taken action to fix it.
Secretary of State Dianna Duran deserves to be voted out of office in the upcoming election for her blatant dereliction of duty on this issue.
The investigation by Progress Now, a progressive organization, cited by Sweeney is here and its disturbing. It was published last May.
In July of this year, USA Today covered New Mexico’s failure to live up to its agreement with the federal government to improve its Motor Voter program, finding, even in 2012, two years after the federal court order to shape up, the state had the fourth worst rate of registration among states registering voters when they sign up for a drivers license. (States like North Dakota which don’t require voter registration, or states that allow for same-day registration and voting don’t need to participate in the program.) The paper describes the state’s current process used to register voters at the MVD, implemented under Duran beginning in January of this year, as being in violation of the law.
New Mexico is not correcting the problem because, apparently, they don’t want to. Duran appears far more interested in pretending Photo ID restrictions are needed at the polls, as this scammy and deceptive campaign video from Duran this week makes clear.
Sweeney goes on to charge in his op-ed that “Duran dedicated her term as secretary of state to rooting out 19 cases of alleged illegal voting, representing a 0.0017 percent rate of fraud if all are convicted. Now, having the power to prevent the disenfranchisement of at least a hundred times more voters, she is sitting on her hands.”
At the very top of Duran’s campaign website she is quoted as saying her “primary objective is to ensure the integrity of the electoral system” and that “the foundation for legitimacy is based on the people’s confidence that elections are conducted fairly”. She has failed on both counts.
Elections have been disastrous at times, by various measures, for years in New Mexico, even when Democrats were in charge of the “voting mechanisms” — though not in the way Republicans there have infamously charged.
Duran, elected in 2010, is the state’s first Republican Sec. of State since 1928. Her Democratic opponent next week is Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who, as the two-term top election official in the state’s most populous county, has been actively fighting for voting rights, rather than fighting to keep her constituents from exercising them.
We don’t generally make endorsements around here and, should Duran get screwed by the “voting mechanisms” in next week’s election, we’ll fight as hard for her and her supporters to receive a fair and transparent count as we would for anybody else, from any party. (Latest polling indicates a “virtual tie” in the NM Sec. of State race.) But, if Sweeney and Progress Now and USA Today’s descriptions of the problems with compliance with the National Voter Registration Act are even close to accurate, Duran deserves to be run out of office this year for ignoring, and even undermining, one of the central responsibilities of that office. The short time we’ve spent looking into Duran, her record, and her (fraudulent and misleading) claims about “voter fraud”, suggest she has no business being the state’s chief election officer.
More well-documented information on Duran, and the sleazy anti-voter crowd she and Gov. Martinez pal around with, can be found in this short report from Progress Now – New Mexico.
This piece is another attack on Duran from a far-Left source. Don’t tell me you believe in Chem trails, do ya? ’cause there’s a lot of cray-cray posts here that seem to fit that category…
You people should deal with facts, not unproven vague claims. The fact is that Dianna Duran has actually been fair and balanced as Secretary of State. She has brought honesty and integrity that has been plagued by corruption for years!!
We need to reelect Duran because she is getting the job done without bias.
We do NOT need Soros’ hand-picked candidate in control of the Sec. of State’s office!
This is why I am voting Dianna Duran!
Yeah, right PolitixFireball! These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along. Nothing here to see.
… PolitixFireball said…
Nope. Brad is reporting an apparent violation of election law.
Brad has actually been rather non-political in regards to election integrity.
As for the GOP, however… well various elements of the GOP decided some time ago that an official GOP policy of throwing election integrity out the window in order to disenfranchise potentially Democratic-leaning voters was a viable strategy for their party.
And this sugar-coated strategy of voter disenfranchisement is indeed an official GOP policy.
And so it often turns out that for many GOP candidates being on the wrong side of the facts, law, logic and science of elections is literally an official GOP policy… many GOP candidates, but not all of them.
Non sequitur… as in not even totally irrelevant.
Ad hominem attack.
Wouldn’t this sort of “logic” make Duran a hand-picked Koch brothers/Karl Rove candidate?
Duran’s apparent policy of not processing certain voter registrations would definitely further the political agenda of the Koch/Rove PACS… to the great detriment of all New Mexico voters
Again, more evidence the GOP is actively following a strategy of disenfranchising voters, since they know that disproportionately their methods disenfranchise more Democratic-leaning voters than GOP – and that the more people who vote, the less likely they are to win, since their policies broadly are in opposition to the welfare of the great majority of the population.
That the mainstream media continues to largely ignore outright law-breaking by GOP state governors and Sec/States can only be a reflection that they are more concerned with keeping the considerable income they receive from campaign ads – to say nothing of ownership that tends to buy in to the idea that democracy needs to be limited to those who have shown themselves “better” – largely by wealth. It also speaks the inattentiveness and ease of distracting American voters from the real issues – “look, a
squirrelcelebrity!”PolitixFireball@1 – nice trolling, come back when you actually have some facts to counter with, instead of playground taunts.
@PolitixFireball
Maggie Toulouse Oliver has been an independent minded election officer for years, what do you know about it? Any state should be happy to have her overseeing elections. You could not find a more fair-minded individual to make sure that each and every valid ballot is counted and that each voter has an opportunity to cast that ballot.
Where is your hand-picked Soros candidate information coming from? Oliver has been County Clerk of Bernalillo County for years and has earned her right to the SoS seat.
Here is her website: http://maggietoulouseoliver.com
I just donated to her campaign, so suck it.
You people should deal with facts, not unproven vague claims. The fact is that Dianna Duran has actually been fair and balanced as Secretary of State.
OhOh, your Fox is showing
Trollers must be hot and heavy on your blog Brad, I noticed how they always seem to come in first with their comments.