Democracy, voting, and writing were the subjects of a panel talk last night at a Canyon Road gallery.
Author and teacher Natalie Goldberg joined Santa Fe County Clerk Katharine Clark at Edition ONE gallery for the discussion.
Clark, whose core responsibility is to ensure that the county is running fair and lawful elections, talked about efforts to make the system more resilient at a time when misinformation is deployed to attack election integrity.
She said that on occasion, candidates themselves are sources of misinformation and that her team sometimes has to remind them that, “We are all on team turnout.”
Goldberg, whose latest book is Writing on Empty, stated that U.S. citizens are becoming ignorant about what democracy is and how we protect it. She said that non-democratic governments make it more difficult for us to live in ways that we take for granted.
She cited two very different examples, saying that in a nation with no democracy, it’s more likely that writers wouldn’t be allowed to write and gun-owners might not be permitted to keep their weapons.
Earlier this year, an MIT study ranked New Mexico as number one in the nation at holding nonpartisan, objective elections.
That’s despite the fact that elections officials here have been threatened with violence and have had to deal with a county board that tried to undermine election results in 2022 with an attempted decertification that was ultimately deemed illegal.
A spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office said that last night’s event was the first in a series of panel chats on the issues bringing together artists and state or local officials.
