When New Mexico residents in Las Cruces, Alamogordo, Albuquerque, Carlsbad, Clayton, Farmington, Gallup, Las Vegas, Santa Fe, Silver City, and Taos go the polls this election cycle, watchers from Observe New Mexico Elections will be onsite to keep a record of the things happening at their polling place.
ONME is a nonpartisan initiative to increase transparency and trust in New Mexico’s elections, to ensure that all voters can have confidence in how elections are conducted.
The organization trains and deploys impartial election observers while voting is underway in those 11 municipalities across the state. The observers are trained regarding relevant laws, procedures, and safeguards in New Mexico’s electoral process and verify that those procedures are followed consistently.
ONME’s findings will be compiled in a final assessment at the end of the year and shared with the public.
A year ago, ONME was in 29 counties throughout the state, but since local elections are on the slate for this year, it is only observing municipal elections.
“Local elections are critical to community decision-making, and our goal is to strengthen transparency, accountability, and voter confidence by providing accurate, independent observations of how election processes are run,” said Carmen Lopez, co-Leader of ONME. “Last year’s election observation efforts proved to be a great success, yielding a number of important insights that will help our state to continuously improve elections in the future. We look forward to continuing these successful observation efforts this fall.”
ONME is funded by the Jimmy and Roslyn Carter Center in Atlanta, which has been heavily involved in election observation internationally. New Mexico was first up to take this on in the United States.
“New Mexico was the proof-of-concept last year, and then they’re expanding elsewhere,” Lopez said. “New Mexico was ranked at the top of the MIT’s election performance index for well-run elections, so this was a good place to start and then also because our laws allow for a pretty high level of transparency to election processes to the public. There is an allowance in New Mexico state law that’s new that allows for non-partisan election observation.”
It takes a certain kind of volunteer to qualify as an ONME election observer.
“We interview every volunteer observer who works with us, and then we provide them with a minimum of four hours of training,” Lopez said. “The vetting process is much more significant than other volunteer operations that I’ve been involved with historically. We want to make sure that people are volunteering because they care about attending to process and not outcome and that they’re interested in representing all voters and not a group of voters and that they are the kind of people who are capable of and want to go into a polling place and not intervene, not criticize, but simply observe. There’s a particular kind of person who wants to do that.”
The pushback has been surprisingly limited, with the concerns that have been raised coming from lack of familiarity with what ONME is doing.
“There were a lot of questions last year because, for example, when we were watching the vote-by-mail counting in Santa Fe, Las Cruces, and Albuquerque, the presiding judges and the poll workers had never had anybody observe vote-by-mail counting before,” Lopez said.” There’s a general lack of familiarity with nonpartisan elections observers because it’s new in state law.”
She does believe this is the start of something that will continue to grow across other states as concerns about election integrity continues to be raised in partisan political circles.
Early voting in New Mexico will conclude on Saturday, Nov. 1, and Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 4.
Click here to read the full article by Kurt Johnson from The Las Cruces Bulletin.