Security around U.S. elections has been a growing concern in recent years, and the Santa Fe area is no different.
Santa Fe County Clerk Katharine Clark told KSFR yesterday that her office will be spending about $100,000 this year to pay for private security officers at polling locations.
"Our primary goal is to make sure that the ballots are secure and that our workers and voters are secure," Clark said.
"I do think the tone of this election has in the last week kind of turned up a notch. We were hoping to maybe not see it, but we were expecting it, and are responding to what we see as sort of tailing behavior.”
Clark is referring to an uptick of people who go to polling locations and then sometimes follow election workers as they drive away from those sites.
People have a right to observe and take video at the polls, she said, but this year, there have been a few reports of security officers having to intervene when they observe what Clark called “tailing behavior.”
There’s also 24-hour video surveillance of ballot drop boxes and one incidence thus far of someone being caught throwing trash into one as some sort of protest.
One of the biggest challenges during every election cycle, Clark said, is ensuring that all absentee and mail-in ballots arrive by election day. Ballots that arrive after are not included in the election count.
She lauded the contributions of postal workers, who will sometimes call the elections office or hand-deliver ballots that get mailed in the last days before the election.
Clark or her colleagues will sometimes drive to post office in far-flung towns to ensure those ballots are counted.
One of the changing aspects of the process is that every ballot dropped in a Santa Fe county mailbox has to go to Albuquerque to a postal sorting location where it is scanned before it is delivered to Santa Fe.
As the U.S. Postal Service seeks to further streamline its operations, there may someday be only 20 such sorting centers in the country, which would mean absentee ballots in New Mexico might have to leave the state before being counted locally.
Once the ballots arrive, there may still be challenges if there’s a problem with a ballot signature or if a voter hasn’t included the last four digits of their social security number. Both are key for linking one ballot with one voter.
Those are ballots that need to be cured, to use the election parlance. In those cases, Clark said, her team does everything it can to connect with the relevant voter and help them correct the problem.
“ Typically we get about 150 people per election who need to cure their ballot, and we whittle it down, typically to less than 30 people," Clark said.
"So, knocking is the last resort, but we do do it. And I have been down in Edgewood, visiting a polling site and knocking on doors.”
Voters who wish to check on the status of their ballot or seek other election information are encouraged to visit nmvote dot.org.
