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.
Reporter Heath Haussamen of NMPolitics.net says that he has “identified several potential IPRA violations” by Secretary of State Dianna Duran’s office over requests pertaining to alleged illegal voters in New Mexico.
Secretary of State Dianna Duran
This is not the first time that Duran has been criticized for her lack of openness from those looking for information on this same investigation. The American Civil Liberties Union chapter in New Mexico and the Santa Fe New Mexican outlined their troubles with receiving the documents earlier this month.
Last week, Milan Simonich of the Texas-New Mexico News papers Partnership, which runs several newspapers in southern New Mexico and Texas, reported that the investigation was “covered in secrecy.”
In a commentary piece, Haussamen wrote that his attempts to receive information on the 37 alleged illegal voters reminded him of “dealing with Richardson all over again.” Former Gov. Bill Richardson used executive privilege to reject open records records using the Inspection of Public Records Act, or IPRA, by journalists and others.
Haussamen writes that after filing data requests he received different records than the ACLU-NM did when it requested similar information.
The e-mails are so heavily redacted that they’re mostly useless, but there’s one interesting letter in that batch of documents – a letter from Duran to the AG’s office asking for advice on what the office could release in response to records requests from me and others.In fact, it’s the very letter I asked Duran to release when I had her on the phone – the letter she told me she could not release.
Why the redactions in the documents provided to the ACLU? Executive privilege, Sanchez told me.
“Revelation of the information within these emails will compromise the Secretary of State’s decision-making process, and thus outweighs the public’s interest in disclosure,” Sanchez wrote.
That sounds familiar. During the years Bill Richardson was governor, executive privilege was known as the way to keep documents secret when there was no other way to legally do it.
Duran made the claim of illegal voters during a committee hearing in this year’s legislative session, which ended a month ago.
