1 million folks in N.M. will be eligible to vote

By Ollie Reed Jr.
Albuquerque Tribune Reporter   08 October 2004

There will be more than 150,000 new voters in New Mexico once the dust from the voter-registration stampede clears.

"New Mexico will cast more votes in this election than in any election in its history," Brian Sanderoff, president of Research and Polling and a veteran tracker of stats and trends, said Friday, just a couple of hours shy of the voter registration deadline.

Sanderoff said there were 900,073 registered voters in New Mexico in 2000. As of Wednesday, there were 1,051,536 registered voters in the state, already an increase of 151,463, according to the Secretary of State's Office.

About 30,000 of those new voters will be in Bernalillo County.

Mary Herrera, Bernalillo County clerk, said there were 312,341 registered voters in the county in 2000. As of Friday afternoon, just hours short of the registration deadline, she said total voter registration in the county numbered 338,828, and she and her staff were still tallying.

Herrera said her workers had approximately 12,000 forms still to process at that point.

Sanderoff said it is not unusual to have greater voter registration activity in a presidential-election year, because there is more at stake and campaign and special-interest groups are better organized.

"But having said that, I think there is greater interest in this presidential election because there is stronger polarization," Sanderoff said. "We are at war, and people have different opinions about that. George Bush now has a track record, and people have different opinions about that."

Considering the frenzied voter-registration activity, Sanderoff said the voter ranks have not swelled as substantially as they might have, because a total of about 100,000 inactive voters were purged from the state rolls after the 2000 and 2002 elections.

"So it was only about a month and a half ago that we reached the same level of voters we had in 2000," he said. "I can't say whether the new voters being registered are the same ones that were purged or not."

But he said the new voters are a critical population who are not forgotten after they are signed up.

"I think the special-interest groups that have been doing the registrations are more involved in follow-up campaigns this year - sending people applications for mail-in ballots and doing follow-up phone calls," he said. "This year they are not only registering them but focusing on getting them to vote."

As of Wednesday, 51 percent of the state's registered voters were Democrat, 32 percent were Republican, 1 percent were Greens, 2 percent other parties and 14 percent declared no party.

Forty-six percent of Bernalillo County's total voters were Democrats, 34 percent were Republicans, 1 percent were Greens, 2 percent other parties and 17 percent no party.

Herrera said her staff of 55, including 44 temporary employees, would be working Friday night, today and Sunday to get the new voters into the system.

"We have to verify them in the computer to make sure they are not already entered," Herrera said. "From there, they are given to the data-entry system - the secretary of state's and our own. Then a maintenance crew makes sure they were entered correctly, makes corrections if necessary and then prints the voter registration card."

Herrera said it takes two to three weeks from receipt of the registration to print and deliver the cards.

She said there will be little or no let up in the work load in her office until after the election is over.

"Now I'm trying to keep up with the absentee applications," she said. "And we will have temporary workers at 12 early-voter sites for three weeks. I will keep some (temporary workers) after the election for the canvassing board."

In the 2000 election, Herrera said, it took a couple of days to hand tally some 12,000 ballots rejected by voter machines.

"And this year has been the busiest ever," she said.