COMMENTARY: Branch Rickey, a manager who helped break the color barrier in Major League Baseball, said, “Luck is the residue of design.” I’ve thought about this as I’ve read varying opinions about the secretary of state disqualifying Angel Peña from running for New Mexico’s Second Congressional District seat in Congress.
Campaigns are tedious work. Everything needs to go right. In Angel’s case, 11 pages of signatures to get him on the ballot — 186 signatures in all — were disqualified. He fell short of the 623 to qualify.
Courtesy photo
Sarah Silva
One page was disqualified because it listed an address where Angel isn’t registered to vote. Two were disqualified because headers contained extra text. And eight had an apparent print formatting error — the “ñ” in Angel’s last name and in “Doña Ana County” appeared instead as an “Õ”. That “Õ” was scratched out and an “ñ” was handwritten on those pages.
It’s the disqualification of pages with the “ñ” error that have some people bringing race into the conversation about why Angel was disqualified and crying foul.
Many of our systems have roots in white supremacy. Government was not designed to function for people targeted by systemic racism. What happened with Angel’s petitions was not racism.
The law prohibits handwritten modifications to petitions for a reason. These are mistakes you can’t make if you want to have your candidacy for Congress appear on the ballot — or have a petition to raise the minimum wage certified by the city clerk.
When I was director of NM CAFé and led a ballot initiative to raise Las Cruces’ minimum wage, we trained ourselves on correct signature collection. We tossed out bad signature pages before the city clerk could. We collected many more signatures than we needed to be sure we’d meet the threshold. We trained white volunteers to get signatures from people who didn’t look like them.
There were rules about who could collect signatures and who couldn’t. There were accents, tildes, hyphens, bad addresses, challenges to elected city officials who collected signatures and other obstacles to avoid. We prepared for most of it.
I needed to ensure no one would assume we won because of some shortcut or preferential treatment. I didn’t want to be accused of benefiting from a left-leaning council or getting what we wanted because our staff was predominantly women of color.
We knew the city clerk would not make exceptions for our mistakes. We made mistakes, of course. We did our best to catch them. We made it hard for people to find fault with how we ran our campaign. I disliked the guilt I felt telling a volunteer that his or her sheets wouldn’t pass muster, but our design required rigor. Volunteers were successful, and we found victory.
Later, when a recall campaign was launched against city councilors supporting the minimum wage increase, I was relieved that it would have to go through the same rigorous process. I was grateful for rules that tossed out a recall because their campaign failed to gather enough valid signatures. The city’s minimum wage increase was safe.
The minimum wage campaign didn’t rely on luck or good graces — we designed success through hard work and attention to detail. Campaigns design their success or failure.
The fact that another amazing candidate with a name like Xochitl (and a hyphen in her last name) made the ballot for Congress this year is a great win for democracy and representation in the 2nd District.
Sarah Silva is a Las Cruces native and coaches community organizers across the country to develop leadership and win campaigns.