New voters' ballots could be thrown out   (NM)

Maggie Ybarra    New Mexico Daily Lobo   06 October 2008

Students who have recently registered to vote may swing the Nov. 4 election - if their ballots are not disqualified.

Richard Abraham, owner of Business Computing Solutions, said Bernalillo County is seeing an influx of voters who are newly registered but that a large number of them have not been entered in the state's system yet.

"There are still about 15,000 registrations that haven't been processed," he said.

New voters may risk having their votes counted as provisional and possibly thrown out, Abraham said.

"Let's say for example that those people go in to vote and they've never voted before," he said. "They're going to be put on a provisional ballot no matter where they go - even if they go to an early voting site."

Abraham said lawyers from the Republican and Democratic parties often argue over which provisional ballots qualify.

"There's a whole bunch of reasons they can disqualify a provisional ballot," he said. "They may not be able to read the signature. They may not be able to verify the address. In some cases it may be a wrong address. Any small anomaly can get that ballot thrown out."

Students can avoid these potential problems by voting in the precinct where they are registered, which they can determine by looking up their name and birth date on their County Clerk's Web site.

Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver said that in a close election, the deciding factor for a candidate could come down to a legal argument over provisional ballots.

She said the 2006 District 1 congressional race came down to less than 900 votes, and lawyers argued over which provisional ballots should count.

Some of the provisional ballots were disqualified, leaving many voters with a vote that didn't count, Toulouse Oliver said.

"When you do have a tight election - because of the gray areas in the law - sometimes you do have sort of on-the-spot legal proceedings that can happen in the after-election processes," she said.

Abraham said students who used to live in the Student Residence Center and didn't change their address in time for this year's election could also have their ballots disqualified after voting provisionally.

"The SRC I think holds about 500 residents over there, and currently there's almost 1,000 (voters) registered there," he said. "So what's going to happen to those folks - the kids that moved - when they move out of there, if they don't change their address, and let's say they move to the Heights, and they try to vote in the Heights, they're going to be voting on a provisional ballot. But then when they check their registration and see that they're registered here, (lawyers could) say that they couldn't vote in that area, and so they'll disqualify the ballot."

Abraham said problems with provisional ballots plagued the February presidential primary.

"There were 17,000 provisional (ballots) just in that one day, and it's just an unheard-of number, and how do you process that many in a timely matter?" he said. "So, that's why it ended up taking 11 days to figure out the results."

Abraham said some provisional ballots were disqualified in that election.

"A lot of them were probably thrown away, so they didn't count, and that's the sad part," he said. "Most people don't even know if their provisional ballot was counted or if it was thrown away."

Student Marissa Valdez, a member of PIRG, said she was distressed to find out that some newly registered voters may have their votes jeopardized.

She said she has been trying to register as many students as possible before the Nov. 4 election and that groups on campus have also been helping large numbers of students register.

"From what I hear from the people I talk to is that some people are getting 70 people to register in a day," she said. "Everyone has individual numbers, but it's at least - at least - 70 a day."

Valdez said students should have been informed of the provisional ballot issue sooner.

"The one thing that made me upset … is that they didn't inform anyone, and they've known this beforehand," she said. "We could have been working on this a lot more."