I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The election might be over, but the City Clerk’s office is still hard at work on it. Employees are working to tally the official count of Albuquerque’s municipal election results now, counting provisional ballots as well as a small number of hand-tallied ballots to the machine tabulated numbers. That process will be complete within 10 days of the election, City Clerk Randy Autio says.
In the meantime, we can go ahead and compare the unofficial 2009 results—which Autio assured us won’t change significantly—to the 2005 results for a little post-election turn-out analysis. Two things immediately come to mind: the “Obama voters” didn’t come out, and the action was in City Council District 5.
Turn-out overall this year was only about 83,213 people, or 25 percent of registered voters. That’s slightly less than the 86,757 in 2005. What happened to the wave of voters who turned New Mexico solidly blue on the federal level in 2008?
Looking at the numbers, it’s clear that City Council District 5 was key to Richard Berry’s mayoral win last Tuesday night.
District 5 is the only city council district in the city that saw an increase in turn-out, from 9,724 in 2005 to 11,127 in 2009. All other city council districts saw decreased turn-out.
We know there was a large measure finance committee aggressively urging voters to oust Councilor Michael Cadigan from office. And we also know that District 5 Councilor-elect Daniel Lewis ran a very energetic and aggressive campaign.
Cadigan didn’t take public financing, which may have been a strategic error. Because he didn’t take public financing, Cadigan didn’t qualify for matching funds when the measure finance committee targeted him.
There was also a measure finance committee created by the Republican Party to urge voters to vote against the quarter cent transportation tax.
We don’t have the data yet to show the party breakdown across districts, and we can’t say with certainty the Republican Party targeted that district. If it did, its message, and any get-out-the-vote efforts would have helped both Berry and Lewis.
