Election Officials Grapple With Voting Irregularities in New Mexico

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• JIM LEHRER:

  And now, the last of our week of "Big Picture" reporting from the battleground state of New Mexico. It's about the voting itself.

  Correspondent Gene Grant of KNME-Albuquerque has the story.

• GENE GRANT, KNME Correspondent:

  Eighty miles west of Albuquerque, along historic Route 66, sits the tiny community of Grants, the site of a lingering electoral controversy since June.

  At stake was the Democratic nomination for a State Senate seat. David Ulibarri was declared the winner by just five votes, despite the fact that 182 ballots went missing.

  Clemente Sanchez lost, and he's still frustrated that even a state investigation hasn't led to the missing ballots.

• CLEMENTE SANCHEZ:

  The investigation that's been going on for the last month-and-a-half, two months, maybe more than two months, and they have no idea what happened to these 182 ballots.

• GENE GRANT:

  Sanchez says he and many of his supporters have lost faith in the system.

• VOTER:

  There were so many ballots lost that — I don't know. Was it mine? Was it my family's? What happened to them?

• GENE GRANT:

  Cibola County Clerk Eileen Martinez oversaw the vote, and she's in the dark, too.

• EILEEN MARTINEZ, Cibola County Clerk:

  I don't know what happened to those ballots. And the attorney general's office was here and they investigated, and we got a letter from them that there was no misconduct or anything like that, so we don't know where those ballots went, so…

• GENE GRANT:

  New Mexico has a history of razor-thin election margins, which means small problems have the potential to add up to larger troubles, and not just troubles over missing ballots, but counting them, too. It's taken weeks to certify elections here in recent years.

  Provisional ballots — ballots cast by voters whose eligibility was in question or who went to the wrong polling place — are partly to blame, because it takes a long time to verify all the information.

  Maggie Toulouse Oliver is the clerk in New Mexico's most populous county, Bernalillo, which includes Albuquerque.

• MAGGIE TOULOUSE OLIVER, Bernalillo County Clerk:

  It's so funny. I always get asked the question, "Why does it take so long in New Mexico?" Well, it always takes that long. Nobody's paying attention unless it's a close election.

  If the provisional ballots are not going to determine the outcome of the election, the process is largely ignored by the general public, because the outcome has been decided.

• GENE GRANT:

  Technical troubles with voting equipment have vexed state officials, too. In 2004, more than 20,000 ballots were cast without a vote for president, leading some to charge that touch-screen machines hadn't properly counted the votes.

  George W. Bush won the state by less than 6,000 votes. That led New Mexico to switch to optical scan machines that use paper ballots, like many other states.

  Toulouse Oliver believes that was a good decision by the state.

• MAGGIE TOULOUSE OLIVER:

  If there's ever a question, if there's ever a doubt about the accuracy of the system, we can go back and look at those paper ballots. We can hand-count them.

  If a machine fails in the course of an election, a voter can still vote. They don't have to stop or wait or be turned away from the polls, so there are so many advantages to having a paper system over an electronic system.