{"id":539874,"date":"2018-03-08T09:50:13","date_gmt":"2018-03-08T16:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=539874"},"modified":"2018-03-08T09:50:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T16:50:13","slug":"penas-disqualification-from-congressional-contest-wasnt-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/03\/penas-disqualification-from-congressional-contest-wasnt-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"Pe\u00f1a\u2019s disqualification from congressional contest wasn\u2019t racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

COMMENTARY:\u00a0<\/strong>Branch Rickey, a manager who helped break the color barrier in Major League Baseball, said, \u201cLuck is the residue of design.\u201d I\u2019ve thought about this as I\u2019ve read varying opinions about the secretary of state disqualifying Angel Pe\u00f1a from running for New Mexico\u2019s Second Congressional District seat in Congress.<\/p>\n

Campaigns are tedious work. Everything needs to go right. In Angel\u2019s case, 11 pages of signatures to get him on the ballot \u2014 186 signatures in all \u2014 were disqualified. He fell short of the 623 to qualify.<\/p>\n

\"Sarah

Courtesy photo<\/p>

Sarah Silva<\/p><\/div>\n

One page was disqualified because it listed an address where Angel isn\u2019t registered to vote. Two were disqualified because headers contained extra text. And eight had an apparent print formatting error \u2014 the \u201c\u00f1\u201d in Angel\u2019s last name and in \u201cDo\u00f1a Ana County\u201d appeared instead as an \u201c\u00d5\u201d. That \u201c\u00d5” was scratched out and an \u201c\u00f1\u201d was handwritten on those pages.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the disqualification of pages with the \u201c\u00f1\u201d error that have some people bringing race into the conversation about why Angel was disqualified and crying foul.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s petitions was not racism.<\/p>\n

The law prohibits handwritten modifications to petitions for a reason. These are mistakes you can\u2019t make if you want to have your candidacy for Congress appear on the ballot \u2014 or have a petition to raise the minimum wage certified by the city clerk.<\/p>\n

When I was director of NM CAF\u00e9 and led a ballot initiative to raise Las Cruces\u2019 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\u2019d meet the threshold. We trained white volunteers to get signatures from people who didn\u2019t look like them.<\/p>\n

There were rules about who could collect signatures and who couldn\u2019t. 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.<\/p>\n

I needed to ensure no one would assume we won because of some shortcut or preferential treatment. I didn\u2019t want to be accused of benefiting from a left-leaning council or getting what we wanted because our staff was predominantly women of color.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t pass muster, but our design required rigor. Volunteers were successful, and we found victory.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s minimum wage increase was safe.<\/p>\n

The minimum wage campaign didn\u2019t rely on luck or good graces \u2014 we designed success through hard work and attention to detail. Campaigns design their success or failure.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Sarah Silva<\/a> is a Las Cruces native and coaches community organizers across the country to develop leadership and win campaigns. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The law prohibits handwritten modifications to petitions for a reason. These are mistakes you can\u2019t make if you want to have your candidacy for Congress appear on the ballot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":539877,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,16],"tags":[2238,219,3650,143],"class_list":["post-539874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-guest-columns","tag-2018-election","tag-2nd-congressional-district","tag-angel-pena","tag-race-and-ethnicity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539874","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=539874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}