SANTA FE —Six weeks before New Mexico’s June 3 primary, here is a running list of possible obstacles to a smooth election, according to state and local election officials.


Many of the state’s 33 counties think a $1 million-a-year price tag charged by a Nebraska-based firm to maintain the electronic tabulators and other equipment it sold to New Mexico is too rich for their blood.

 

New Mexico can’t leverage federal money to pick up the maintenance cost because the state spent all the money Congress gave it for elections earlier this decade, or more than $19 million, according to preliminary findings of a federal audit.

 

And while Secretary of State Mary Herrera’s office will ask the state next month for $305,000 to pay to maintain the machines through the general election, it’s unclear whether Herrera even has the legal standing to make the request.

 

The state and some counties are tangled up in a dispute over who owns the machines, the state or the counties.

 

Until the question is resolved, it’s unclear who can actually request money to pay Nebraska-based ES&S, state and local elections officials acknowledged Thursday.



That complex, confusing stew of facts came out Thursday during a lengthy legislative hearing at the state capitol on the state’s readiness for the June 3 primary.

 

State lawmakers principally wanted to know if New Mexico would finally throw off its reputation this year for running error-prone elections that often keep the rest of the nation waiting on its results.

 

 

The question arises out of recent experience: New Mexico’s Feb. 5 Democratic presidential caucus, which was run by the state Democratic Party, kept the nation waiting for days on its results. And while the state or counties played no official role in the caucus, it perpetuated New Mexico’s reputation for running confusing elections.

 

"With resources at hand, you believe you can organize an efficient election?" Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, asked Herrera, who took over as Secretary of State in January 2007.



"We are on target. We’re working. We are meeting all deadlines. We are surviving with the staff we have," Herrera said. Only minutes before, Herrera told lawmakers that she hadn’t hired a full-time permanent state elections director because of budget constraints.



Local elections officials aren’t as sanguine as Herrera.


At least two local elections officials said county clerks and their staffs around the state worry that there aren’t enough memory cards, which contain the software to operate the tabulators that count the paper ballots. Run out of memory cards and the likelihood increases that local elections officials will have to count ballots by hand, said Santa Fe County elections director Denise Lamb.



Local elections officials also disagree with Herrera’s contention that her office has promulgated all the rules that local officials need to know how to administer the election.



"That hasn’t happened," said Sheryl Nichols, the chief deputy Los Alamos County clerk and representative for the New Mexico county clerks association.



Herrera and her staff pointed to a lack of funding by the Legislature as a contributor to the way things stand now.

Of course, some problems preceded Herrera’s tenure as secretary of state.

 

The final report of the federal audit, expected in late May, will show that Herrera’s predecessor, Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, now a candidate for Congress, spent all of the money Congress appropriated to the state to upgrade its elections system. Much of that went toward buying the fleet of electronic tabulators and equipment that count paper ballots. But more than $6.2 million went to advertising, said Don Francisco Trujillo III, Herrera’s deputy.



Unlike other states that squirreled away a share of its federal money for contingencies, New Mexico has nothing left of its federal elections money to pay for maintenance costs of the machines, he said.


"It was spent. There was not a penny left," he said.