Accuracy of NM Secretary of State's Voter List Questioned

Heather Clark of the Associated Press has written a thoughtful and comprehensive article discussing problems encountered with the voter lists used at caucus sites during New Mexico's February 5th Democratic presidential caucus. New Mexico's Secretary of State's office, along with those of many other states, contracts with ES&S, a Nebraska-based corporation, to maintain its master list of registered voters.

The Democratic Party of New Mexico used the Secretary of State's list to generate the list used at the caucus sites. According to the Party, the only changes made to the master list were the result of a merge operation conducted by TrueBallot, which added in late additions sent by three counties. The Party contracted with TrueBallot to produce the list used at the caucus sites.

As quoted in the article, reports from caucus volunteers, long-time registered voters who weren't on the caucus site list, the Mora County Clerk and others seem to point to the Secretary of State's list as a likely source of data problems. Excerpts:

In interviews with The Associated Press, several voters and volunteer poll workers pinpointed problems with the voter lists at polling places—and raised the possibility that the trouble may have originated not with the party but with the voter lists Democratic organizers were provided by the Secretary of State's office and county clerks.

In Mora County, for example, where half the voters cast provisional ballots, about 1,000 Democrats were stripped of their party affiliation in the Secretary of State's databank and so were never given to the Democratic Party for the caucus list, County Clerk Charlotte Duran said.

In one Bernalillo County polling place, last names beginning with the letter "A" were missing, said Lynn Jacobs, a volunteer poll worker at the site. In San Miguel County, voters on an entire street did not appear on the list, said Pat Leahan, director of the Las Vegas Peace and Justice Center who observed the caucus. And Caucus Director Beth Adams said caucus workers have noticed the names of some people whose addresses were rural routes or post office boxes were not included on the lists.

The names of state Auditor Hector Balderas and state District Judge William Lang—both longtime Democrats and voters—were omitted from the voter lists that were relied on during the Super Tuesday caucus, the two officials said.

A half dozen poll workers said they saw other longtime Democrats try to vote on Super Tuesday only to find their names were not on the lists.

"I had person after person, who had voted in every election, they hadn't moved in years, and were not on the lists," Jacobs said.

Since the lists were provided by Secretary of State Mary Herrera's office, any problems during the caucus could be repeated for the June primary and general election in November.

The question is: Were the problems inherent in the original lists provided by Herrera's office or did the Democrats change the data and inadvertently knock off voters' names?

... Anne Kass, a retired district judge and regular party volunteer, said nearly half those who voted by provisional ballot at the Albuquerque polling place where she worked were regular Democratic voters, who carried their voter ID cards that showed they were in the correct polling place.

"They would say, 'My spouse's name is here. My kids' names are here.' It was bizarre," Kass said.

Kass said the problems on caucus day make her worry about whether they will be repeated in later elections this year.

"I'm concerned about June and November. I'm concerned about the accuracy of elections and have been for some time now," she said.

The Response of the Secretary of State
Unfortunately, NM Secretary of State Mary Herrera and others in her office seem uninterested in determining if there are problems with the state's master list, as produced by ES&S:

A spokesman for Herrera said her office has no immediate plans to investigate reports of missing voter names and is waiting to hear from the Democratic Party about any inadequacies with the lists.

"If there are any discrepancies, it would have been after it would have been received by the Democratic Party. Let them investigate it. Let's find out what really happened," spokesman James Flores said.

The article goes on to debunk this view in regard to at least some of the errors encountered:

But Mora County's missing voter names happened before they handed over their lists to the Democrats, Duran said.

Clerks there discovered after the caucus that about 1,000 Democrats and about 100 Republican voters had been stripped of their party affiliation in the databank. So the Democrats' names were never passed to the party to be included in the caucus lists.

Duran said she contacted Election Systems & Software, which contracts with the state to manage the software, but was unable to get a guarantee that the problem would not crop up again.

"They couldn't answer me or they didn't want to," she said.

... Since 2000, the Nebraska-based company has provided the state with software, which was last updated in December, Flores said. County clerks offices are responsible for updating voter information, which, in turn, automatically updates the Secretary of State's list, he said.

"Everything that the software was supposed to have done before we handed over the list to the Democrats, we're satisfied with," Flores said.

Dem Party Investigation
Meanwhile, the Dem Party has said they will be studying how the caucus was conducted and looking further into complaints about the voter list:

The Democrats say they plan to investigate complaints about voter lists they received. Democratic Party Chairman Brian Colon and Gov. Bill Richardson have scheduled an April 25 summit in Albuquerque to discuss the caucus, and Colon and Lt. Gov. Diane Denish are talking about forming a committee to review the caucus.

"We're going to take a long-term look both at whatever happened at the caucus and whether we're going to hold a caucus and that's going to take a long time," said Josh Geise, the party's interim executive director, who started working for the party about two weeks after the caucus.

... Geise said three counties—San Juan, Santa Fe and Eddy—had late registrants that did not show up on the Secretary of State's Office lists, but were later forwarded to the party as soon as they were available.

The party then turned the lists over to TrueBallot, which it hired to help administer the caucus.

Response by TrueBallot
TrueBallot denies that anything they did in handling the master list would have created the kinds of errors found with the list at caucus sites:

The company's chief information officer, Nick Koumoutseas, said his company merged the initial Secretary of State list with the late registrants from the three counties and managed the databank.

But Koumoutseas said he does not think names were dropped from the Democrats' list during his company's management of them.

"I've been doing this for 13 years and I generally err on the side of having too many instances of voters. I would have the same name in there twice" in cases were addresses were vague or names showed different spellings, he said.

Speculation on DNC VoteBuilder Merge
The article also addresses questions as to whether there was a merge of the State's list with the DNC's VoteBuilder list that might have caused the problems:

Some poll workers and election watchdog groups have speculated that some of the problems may have come up when the state Democratic Party merged the Secretary of State's list with a VoteBuilder list of Democratic voters, which was prepared by the Democratic National Committee.

Adams said the VoteBuilder list was only used after the caucus to help validate voters who cast provisional ballots and was never merged with the Secretary of State's voter list.

Actions Needed
So what should come next? Obviously every effort should be made to determine the source of the list problems so that errors and omissions can be corrected before we vote again at our June primary and the general election in November. Furthermore, we must learn what kind of system or human errors produced the inaccuracies so that additional inaccuracies aren't produced in the coming months. And if we're to trust our election process, any investigation of the problems must be done out in the open, not behind closed doors. We can't allow any examination into the source of the flawed data to end up as just another political blame game full of deceptions and spin -- while the problems fester uncorrected.

The Secretary of State's office needs to stop the finger pointing and begin working with the Democratic Party to produce an honest assessment of what happened with the voter list and what can be done to assure it doesn't happen again in the future. The DPNM needs to reach out to the Secretary of State and begin working with them to get it done, and get it done out in the open so ALL the problems and their causes are exposed.

Paul Stokes, coordinator of United Voters of New Mexico, an electoral watchdog, said he thinks the Democrats should investigate the problems in conjunction with the Secretary of State's office.

"Clearly this needs to be investigated in a transparent way so the public can know what's going on," he said.

P.S. The reason I quoted so much of the article as published in the Las Cruces Sun-News is that the Albuquerque Journal omitted some of the most important passages when it published a version of this story today. Specifically, the Journal's truncated version omitted some of the quotes by caucus site volunteers and did not include the explanation by TrueBallot of their handling of the list and how it was merged with updates from three counties.