How Clinton Won New Mexico

UPDATE: Much More Here.

Jim Williams is the political journalist for KUNM Radio Albuquerque,
the largest NPR affiliate in New Mexico.

Approximately 13% of the votes in the New Mexico Democratic Caucus were
cast on provisional ballots.

Williams' report aired Wednesday:

> Intro: Some local election officials say they're wondering where the Democratic Party got its list of eligible voters for yesterday's (Tuesday's) presidential preference caucus. The party itself ran the election, not the state or counties. The results of the caucus were as tight as they probably could have been, with Senator Hillary Clinton edging out Senator Barack Obama by 217 votes out of 136-thousand cast. As KUNM's Jim Williams reports, many voters showed up at the polls only to be asked to vote on provisional ballots, because their names weren't on the eligible voter list.
> Williams: Seventeen thousand. That's the number of provisional ballots issued in the New Mexico Democratic presidential preference caucus on Tuesday. Some of the reasons for that relatively high number were likely weather, confusion over voting locations, and confusion over just what a Democratic presidential preference caucus actually is. Some polling locations saw Republicans and Independents, who weren't eligible to vote in the caucus, showing up and trying anyway. But another issue entirely is registered Democrats who showed up and couldn't vote on regular ballots.
> Maes: We verified most of them, and they were in our system, but for some reason they didn't appear on the roster for the caucus.
> Williams: Paul Maes is San Miguel County Clerk. He says his office got calls from whole neighborhoods of Democrats who were on his list of eligible voters but were asked to use provisional ballots. He says he's not sure where the Democratic Party got its list.
> Maes3: I know they didn't get it from us. It has to be the secretary of state's office or ES&S, which is theŠthe main system is the, I guess they contract out with ES&S to maintain voter registration.
> Williams: Maes says there are just three entities that can provide voter lists for electionsŠcounty clerks, the secretary of state's office, and Election Systems and Software, or ES&S.
> Maes2: I just don't know where they pulled the file from, if it was from the secretary of state or from ES&S, or even if they used an old one. But there was a lot of discrepancies in the list that they provided to each polling place.
> Hanhardt1: We did have phone calls from voters who were concerned about the registration and the way we had it in our office.
> Williams: Fran Hanhardt is San Juan County Clerk.
> Hanhardt1: In exploring the records that we have in our office, we determined that in fact they were registered, and should, and were registered at the precinct where they showed up, at the consolidated precinct where they showed up to vote, and should have been on that list.
> Williams: Hanhardt says if the Democratic Party used a list that was older than 20 days or so, that could have been the problem.
> Hanhardt2: Because we were making changes in voter registrations for people who, in fact, changed their registrations the day the books closed, which was 28 days prior to their election, so in our records those people would have shown up on those rosters, um, but they did not show up on the Democratic Party rosters that were presented at the precincts.
> Williams: But James Flores, spokesman for the secretary of state's office, says the list did come through the state's Elections Bureau, overseen by the secretary of state. And it is possible that Election Systems and Software was involved with the list.
> Flores1: The information compiled here at the secretary of state's office is the same information that each of the individual county clerks has. We kind of serve as a, for lack of a better phrase, we serve as a hub for all that information. The last time it was uh, information, updated information was sent, was approximately the 24th of last month.
> Williams: But Hanhardt says it concerns her that there are discrepancies between what she has and what the state has.
> Hanhardt3: If my list shows a voter as being qualified as a voter, then I take offense to the fact that when that voter shows up to vote at a polling place, that he's not given the opportunity to vote in a standard measure. I, but I can't control how they got their list.
> I can only assure that voter that my records are correct, and if the list had been printed from my records, that they would have been on that list.
> Williams: Flores says the secretary of state's office wants to hear from county clerks who saw discrepancies in Tuesday's Democratic caucus.
> Flores2: Uh, they haven't contacted our office, we would need to find out what they're talking aboutŠuhŠwhat voters they're talking about. I know that if there was a just a recent change right before election time, um, there's a file that they call a suspense fileŠand what it does is that uh, it may not have all the current information but it will still allow the voter to vote, but it's very likely they will have to vote provisional. And then of course their vote would count once everything has been verified.
> Williams: San Miguel County Clerk Paul Maes says the high numbers of provisional ballots combined with a new system of handling them this time was likely one of the reasons for the long, slow voting lines at polling locations around the state. So if discrepancies between voter lists led to more provisional ballots, they may have also led to some voters deciding the wait wasn't worth it, which happened in polling places across the state. The state Democratic Party hadn't responded to requests for comment on this story at the time of broadcast. For KUNM, I'm Jim Williams.