Herrera concerned about election in Doña Ana County

County official says his office is handling the flood of absentee ballot requests and will be fine on Tuesday

The secretary of state says she’s concerned that the election may not run smoothly in Doña Ana County on Tuesday unless more help is brought in, but the man in charge of the county’s election says things are going well and will be fine on Election Day.

Mary Herrera said in an interview that her office has received a large volume of complaints this week from people having problems in Doña Ana County, primarily with absentee voting. Herrera said the county’s acting elections supervisor, Mario Jimenez, and his staff are doing an excellent job, she believes they are stretched to thin.

“I don’t think they have enough people, and it’s just not fair to the voters,” Herrera said on Thursday.

Jimenez took issue with Herrera’s assessment of the situation. Though he and his staffers have been busy dealing with the high volume of absentee ballot requests, he said they’re handing it.

“I don’t feel like I’m understaffed right now. Everything seems to be going real good,” he said.

Herrera said the majority of complaints have come from people who have not received absentee ballots in a timely manner. In addition, several people have complained that, when they tried to call the Bureau of Elections, no one answered the phone.

The number of absentee ballot requests has been high around the state, which has caused delays in many counties, but Herrera said the vast majority of complaints to her office have come from Doña Ana County.

“All week long it’s been Las Cruces. It’s been one after the other, one after the other. It’s too heavy to ignore,” Herrera said.

In response to the delays, earlier this week Herrera authorized counties to allow voters who don’t want to wait for their absentee ballots to instead vote in person at early voting sites.

Herrera said she’s also going to send two staffers from her office to Doña Ana County on Election Day to help. And she called the chairman of the county commission on Thursday to ask the county to direct more staffers to assist the elections bureau.

“We’d better address this now, when we can, instead of trying to do it on Election Day,” Herrera said.

There were more than 20 people at the county clerk’s office around 8 p.m. Thursday evening preparing absentee ballots to be mailed out. Jimenez said the ballots headed oversees would be overnighted so the recipients would have time to return them by Election Day. He said all absentee ballot requests from the last two days were being sent out Thursday evening, and the number of requests dropped significantly Thursday.

Jimenez said his office has also instituted “curbside voting” for those who haven’t received an absentee ballot and want to instead vote early but can’t walk. An elections worker will meet them at their vehicle if they can get a ride to a polling place. After the voter fills out a ballot, the elections worker will take it inside and feed it into a counting machine for him or her.

Jimenez is running an office that is without its elections supervisor, Lynn Ellins, who by state law can’t work because he’s a candidate for county clerk. In addition, the outgoing county clerk, Rita Torres, suffers from health problems and isn’t as involved in running the office as she once was.

Jimenez said there’s only one task for which he needs more bodies: He’ll be looking for a few more people to help presiding judges unload materials when they return them to the clerk’s office after the polls close on Election Day.