Here’s what went right with the election in Doña Ana County, and what didn’t

COMMENTARY: There are some things the Doña Ana County Clerk’s Office could have done better during the election.

The mistakes I encountered slowed vote counting and the public’s understanding of what was happening. I’ve seen no evidence of impropriety that should cast doubt on the election results.

That’s important because Republican Yvette Herrell has not conceded defeat in the 2nd Congressional District race to Democrat Xochitl Torres Small. Instead, she has filed a lawsuit asking that state police impound absentee ballots in the county and seeking an investigation of nebulous “improprieties” she alleges but hasn’t detailed publicly.

Herrell has ignored local media while going on Fox News over the weekend to claim that thousands of ballots “magically appeared” in a TV segment that implied wrongdoing. That TV segment played into a national GOP narrative about voter fraud that the facts in this instance don’t support.

So here are some facts.

Torres Small won 3,539 more votes than Herrell, or 1.8 percent, out of 197,601 votes cast. That’s well above the 0.25 percent margin that triggers an automatic recount. Torres Small has won the race.

That’s largely because of an unusually high number of absentee ballots cast in Doña Ana County. There was likely an intentional effort to encourage left-leaning folks to vote absentee because Torres Small, who won just under 65 percent of the overall vote in Doña Ana County, won about 78 percent of more than 8,258 absentee ballots that included votes in the congressional race (there were 8,350 absentee ballots total, but 92 included no vote in the congressional race).

In addition, there were an unusually high number of provisional ballots cast, about 1,100, 0n Election Day in Doña Ana County. Most of them turned out to be valid votes that were counted, which isn’t always the case. The vast majority of those also went to Torres Small.

As a registered independent, I received two or three mailers before the election from a nonprofit group encouraging me to vote absentee and including an official form to request an absentee ballot. (I’m still trying to find information on that group.) I assume many others got the same mailers.

While I’m just speculating here, I suspect those mailers help explain the high numbers of absentee and provisional ballots. If people returned that form and then tried to vote on Election Day instead of returning a filled-out absentee ballot, they would have to vote provisionally because they would already be in the system as voting absentee. Only one or the other would be counted if people tried to vote both ways; the provisional would be rejected if a person also returned an absentee ballot.

At any rate, between absentees and provisionals, we’re talking about nearly 9,500 votes that resulted at least in part from what appears to be a targeted get-out-the-vote effort on the left. Those ballots carried Torres Small to victory.

And we knew about the vast majority of those votes; the secretary of state’s final public update on the number of votes cast before the polls closed came at 4:30 p.m. on Election Day and stated that 7,885 absentee ballots had already been returned in Doña Ana County, 4,951 of them by Democrats. A few hundred more were returned before the 7 p.m. deadline. Ballots didn’t “magically appear.”

Now, the first mistake I saw the Clerk’s Office make was not having its board that counted absentee ballots start sorting them as early as possible. That board is allowed by law to start opening ballots and getting them ready to count as early as the Thursday before the election. They did not.

The second mistake was not having a large enough board of people ready to count absentee ballots on Election Day. The board had seven members on that day. After midnight, Clerk Amanda López Askin sent those exhausted people home with their work only half done. Absentee ballots can’t be added to vote tallies until all of them are counted, so we got no absentee results from the county on Election Day. López Askin added an additional 10 people to the board the day after the election so counting could be completed that day.

The third mistake was not communicating enough with the media and the public about the situation. It wasn’t clear on the night of the election until well after midnight that the totals from Doña Ana County did not include the absentee ballots. López Askin and Chief Deputy Clerk Lindsey Bachman didn’t respond to my texts or public tweets Tuesday evening seeking information about the remaining votes.

Now, all that said, I need to add that it was totally clear to me — and anyone following my Twitter feed that night — that there were thousands of votes left to count in Doña Ana County, and maybe more. I didn’t know they were absentee ballots, but I knew the results posted online were far short of what turnout should be because I’d spent the day visiting polling places and talking to officials and had a rough idea of where turnout would end up.

It’s stunning to me that many news organizations assumed most votes were already counted and erroneously called the race for Herrell on election night. It’s even more stunning that Herrell declared victory before those votes were counted. Her campaign and the county and state GOP apparently weren’t watching the vote in the most populous county in the congressional district closely enough to know there were lots of outstanding votes. That points to weaknesses in Herrell’s campaign that may help explain why she lost.

So that’s it. The county clerk needed to see the absentee ballot situation coming sooner and increase the size of her board, and she needed to do a better job of communicating the status of the vote count on election night.

Given the recent turmoil in that office, those are relatively minor problems, even though they affected a congressional race substantially. I wouldn’t have been surprised if things went much worse in Doña Ana County on Election Day.

The previous clerk, Scott Krahling, abruptly submitted his resignation on Aug. 29. The public later learned that Krahling’s “intimate relationship” with a previous chief deputy clerk, Rose Ann Vasquez, who resigned in March, had harmed staff morale and created a perception, at least, of favoritism.

The departures of Krahling and Vasquez left a leadership void in the office. Bachman came on as the chief deputy clerk in May and was still relatively new to the job when Krahling resigned a few months later. And the county commission appointed López Askin — a former New Mexico State University regent who’d never worked on elections — to be county clerk on Sept. 11.

Through it all, some staffers left the office, which currently has several vacancies. López Askin has also said many longtime poll workers chose to not return for this election. So she and Bachman oversaw Tuesday’s election with fewer staffers and volunteers than needed.

If Herrell and the GOP have evidence of wrongdoing, they need to share it publicly. But their innuendo about ballots being fabricated and elections being stolen, all while spouting rhetoric about ensuring the integrity of the election, actually harms public confidence in elections and the integrity of the process.

At this point, it appears to me the Clerk’s Office should be commended for successfully running this election under some really trying circumstances. It now needs to get fully staffed and make some improvements. I’ll be watching the office going forward to make sure it learns from its mistakes.

Heath Haussamen is NMPolitics.net’s editor and publisher. Agree with his opinion? Disagree? NMPolitics.net welcomes your views. Learn about submitting your own commentary here.