By Austin Fisher
Six of the most rural New México counties will each have just one ballot drop box available for voters this year because they will not have to follow a state regulation requiring at least two.
Bureau of Elections Director Mandy Vigil approved requests from six counties to waive the requirement on Sept. 13.
County clerks for De Baca, Grant, Harding, Lincoln, Mora, and Union Counties all made reduction requests that were granted by the Secretary of State’s Office.
The boxes make voting more accessible for people in a largely rural state where people often drive for hours to reach a polling place, and few people are able to register online because of the lack of broadband infrastructure, said Hannah Burling, president of the League of Women Voters of New Mexico.
In their requests for waivers, all but one of the six county clerks cited a scarcity of resources as the reason why they cannot make more than one drop box available. Three of them pointed to long drives between their offices and the drop box locations — six hours round trip in one case.
“Due to the rural nature of our county, we would have to hire an additional person to service the rural locations,” Harding County Clerk CJ Garrison wrote. “Again, NOT good use of resources.”
Almost identical language about drop boxes not being a good use of resources appears in the request from Union County Clerk Brenda Green.
Elsewhere, Lincoln County Clerk Whitney Whittaker and Mora County Clerk Vivian Trujillo each wrote that they do not have enough staff to monitor the boxes.
Grant County Clerk Marisa Castrillo’s request was different, however. She wrote that it would be difficult to install the box because there is no wiring needed for a security camera to monitor it.
“The ballot box will be susceptible to tampering and vandalism,” Castrillo wrote.
However, it is unclear exactly what kind of box Grant County uses or what makes it susceptible to tampering or vandalism. Castrillo was not immediately available for comment.
Burling said she has never heard of any tampering with ballot drop boxes in the state.
“I believe that drop boxes are very, very safe,” Burling said. “There really hasn’t been any proof of ballot tampering all across the U.S. with drop boxes.”
States Newsroom reports that in the lead up to the 2020 election and since then, Republican lawmakers in many states have tried to limit or end the use of the boxes because of the potential for tampering or fraud, even though there is no proof that has happened.
New México’s Legislature is controlled by Democrats, and has largely gone in the opposite direction: If not for a last-minute filibuster and a short window of time to debate and pass legislation, earlier this year the state likely would have expanded voter protections in state law including a requirement that every county install at least one of the boxes.
There have been maybe five instances of vandalism of drop boxes around the country, Burling said.
“The League is always in favor of anything that makes voting more accessible for people,” including ballot drop boxes, Burling said.
The election denial movement is playing out in New México with recent events in Otero, Sandoval and Torrance Counties, Burling said.
For example, two days after former Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin was barred from office for participating in Jan. 6 attack, he appeared on election denier Joe Oltmann’s podcast and said he planned to introduce a local ordinance “against the ballot drop boxes.”
“So that was my next move, was to draft an ordinance against ballot drop boxes in Otero County,” he said.
Burling said any attempts to limit the use of these drop boxes is a form of voter suppression.
“Anything that makes it harder for someone to vote, for a citizen to vote in this country, is a form of voter suppression,” she said.
New México’s voting system is safe and secure, Burling said — and so is the country’s.
“There’s a great deal of process around keeping the vote safe,” she said. “We are very lucky in New México to have a voting system that is generally recognized as one of the top in the nation.”
Austin Fisher is a Reporter with Source New Mexico. This article is republished from Source New Mexico under a Creative Commons license.
For More New México News: ELSEMANARIO.US
