N.M.'s '08 election results to be audited

Effort should improve future elections, but could affect Obama, McCain race.

ALBUQUERQUE -- New Mexico’s election season hasn’t started well — the awkward resignation of newly appointed state Elections Director Jim Noel and the error-filled notices the secretary of state’s office sent recently to thousands of voters being among the most recent gaffes.

So while it’s anyone’s guess as to how things will go on Nov. 4, voters can at least take heart that there’s now a state law requiring officials to conduct a post-election audit.

The state Legislature approved the law in 2005 but left many of the audit details to Secretary of State Mary Herrera, who has yet to reveal exactly how the audit will be carried out.

She got some unsolicited advice Monday when the nonpartisan group Electionaudits.org issued a list of recommendations that it says will help strengthen the audit process.

Some of the recommendations seem obvious, such as making sure the audit procedure is transparent to the public. But they also include more aggressive measures, such as tracking the custody of voting machines and ballots, and using statisticians to help determine the optimum number of ballots to be recounted.

The audit could potentially find voting irregularities severe enough to change the election results. More likely, experts say, the effort will expose weaknesses in individual counties’ voting systems that could improve future elections.

The new audit law requires the secretary of state and county clerks to hand-count the ballots in 2 percent of precincts chosen at random statewide. Statistically, that suggests most counties would audit a single precinct, or perhaps two or three precincts in the more populous counties.

The counts must be done within five days of each county’s canvass certification. Only one race will be audited, either that of governor or president.

If a discrepancy between the hand count and the earlier machine count is greater than 1.5 percent, all precincts in that legislative district will be recounted in that one race. So it’s at least possible that this year’s audit could force a recount, which in turn might change the statewide results and therefore potentially have an effect on the next occupant of the White House.

‘Healthy for democracy’

Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver has been part of the movement pushing for post-election audits and said she looks forward to conducting the audit in the state’s most populous county in November.

“This is extremely healthy for democracy,” Oliver said during a teleconference with other “good government” advocates Monday, adding afterward that the auditing process should help beleaguered New Mexico voters regain some confidence in the system.

“Ever since 2000, New Mexico has been a closely divided state,” she said, citing the 366-vote margin in the 2000 presidential race and the 5,988-vote difference in 2004.

“When you have elections that close and the stakes as high as they’ve been in these presidential elections, I think it’s really important for us to be able to show that the outcome of that election is valid,” she said.

The secretary of state’s office has drafted rules for conducting the audit and talked about the issue recently with the state’s county clerks, but the final regulations have not yet been provided to the clerks, Oliver said.

James Flores, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said the final rules are in the process of getting approval by the state attorney general’s office. “We don’t know when that will be, but it should be shortly,” he said.

The audit will be a first for the state, but Bernalillo County will go into the audit with a bit of experience. It participated in a project earlier this year that included University of New Mexico political science professor Lonna Atkeson, the secretary of state’s office, professors from CalTech and the University of Utah and others who audited the county’s 2006 election.

The results of that audit will be released next week, but Oliver said her office has already learned from its effort, such as finding the most accurate way to hand-tally ballots and strengthening the protocols for tracking the chain of custody for voting machines and ballots.

One potential highlight of an audit is to point out weaknesses in the system, Oliver said.

“It’s hard to admit things go wrong” during and after an election, she said, “but if we don’t know what’s causing the problems, we can’t fix them.”

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