<\/o:p><\/p>\n\u201c(It was alleged that) apolitical slackers in search of the $7-a-voter bounty some groups were paying simply opened phone books to borrow the fill-in-the-blanks necessities,\u201d she wrote. \u201cCounty clerks were deluged with good forms and bad. The election was looming. An unsuccessful lawsuit demanded that at least some voters show some form of identification.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/o:p><\/p>\n\u201cState Sen. Rod Adair, a Roswell Republican, predicted that thousands of fraudulent voters would flood the polls,\u201d Nelson wrote. \u201cU.S. Attorney David Iglesias trumpeted his formation of a nonpartisan election fraud task force a steely-eyed squad of enforcers to root out every electoral miscreant.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/o:p><\/p>\nThe result? Nothing. Nada. Zilch.<\/p>\n
<\/o:p><\/p>\nTwo weeks after the election, more than 100 complaints of potential voter fraud were submitted, the Tribune reported.<\/p>\n
<\/o:p><\/p>\nNone were prosecuted.<\/p>\n
<\/o:p><\/p>\nThat\u2019s right: There were no prosecutions by New Mexico<\/st1:state>\u2019s Republican U.S.<\/st1:country-region><\/st1:place> attorney, though investigators spent months looking into the complaints.<\/p>\n <\/o:p><\/p>\nThat puts a dent in Republicans\u2019 current allegations of a massive voter-fraud conspiracy.<\/p>\n
<\/o:p><\/p>\nThere have absolutely been some serious problems with elections across the state. But if the Republican U.S. attorney, FBI and Democratic secretary of state couldn\u2019t find prosecutable voter fraud, who will?<\/p>\n
<\/o:p><\/p>\nIncompetence, lax procedures and constantly changing laws appear to be the cause of most of the problems.<\/p>\n
<\/o:p><\/p>\nTwo things need to be admitted here. The first is that there\u2019s no proof voter fraud is prevalent in New Mexico<\/st1:place><\/st1:state>, and that\u2019s probably because it isn\u2019t widespread, though there may be a few isolated instances. The second is that, though there are some barriers to committing voter fraud and the consequences for such action are stiff, the system does still allow for the potential of voter fraud.<\/p>\n <\/o:p><\/p>\nIf Republicans admitted the first and Democrats admitted the second, we would be a lot closer to making progress on this controversial topic. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With all the uproar about alleged voter fraud, I thought it might be interesting to look back at the 2004 election, which is often the springboard for such allegations. Kate Nelson of the Albuquerque Tribune summed up the political climate at the time of the 2004 election well in a Jan. 29, 2005 article: \u201c(It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}