Joe Campos (Photo by Heath Haussamen)

Joe Campos qualified to appear on the primary ballot for lieutenant governor on Saturday after all, the Democratic Party of New Mexico has decided.

The party says it’s required by state law to round up Campos’ 19.69 percent of delegate votes from the preprimary nominating convention to 20 percent – the threshold for qualifying for the ballot at the convention.

The ruling to reverse course and round up was made today by Party Chairman Javier Gonzales following a unanimous vote of the party’s judicial council in support of qualifying Campos for the ballot. That means the party will ask the Secretary of State’s Office to certify three lieutenant governor candidates as having qualified at Saturday’s convention – Campos, Brian Colón and Lawrence Rael.

“We’re back to work, rather us having to look for petition signatures, so obviously this is a lot better,” Campos said in an interview. “We’re going to keep pushing forward.”

Today’s ruling from the party is significant because, by law, those who fail to get 20 percent at the convention have to collect twice as many signatures as those who do get 20 percent if they want to appear on the ballot. And no candidate who has failed the organizational test of getting 20 percent at the convention has gone on to win the primary.

The statute the party cited in reversing courses states that, at any place in the election code “requiring counting or computation of numbers, any fraction or decimal greater than one-half of a whole number shall be counted as a whole number.”

“This is exactly why the Democratic Party of New Mexico waits three days before certifying, so everyone can thoroughly review the rules and make the right call,” attorney John Wertheim, a former state party chairman who was involved in the ruling, said. “In this case, the law is clear.”

The party originally announced Saturday that Colón had 34.3 percent of the vote, Rael had 21.9 percent, Campos had 19.9 percent, Jerry Ortiz y Pino had 18.86 percent and Linda Lopez had 5 percent. After a recount, Colón had 34.54 percent, Rael had 22.15 percent, Campos had 19.69 percent, Ortiz y Pino had 18.87 percent and Lopez had 4.73 percent.

Though Campos’ support fell slightly with the recount, it’s still above the 19.5 threshold at which the party would have rounded up.

Campos says he’ll keep leaping over ‘hurdles’

Campos said the new challenge to the party’s interpretation of the rules came only after a number of county party chairs complained. He said the original interpretation of the election code was an attempt to keep him off the ballot.

“It’s just tough running against the Richardson machine putting up hurdles,” he said. “We just have to keep leaping over them.”

Asked who was putting hurdles in his campaign’s path, Campos declined to specify. Richardson has not endorsed any candidate in the race, and he did not specifically accuse Richardson.

“What I’m saying is that there’s been hurdles. A lot of my supporters have been strong-armed. Donors have been threatened. It’s one after another,” he said.

Ortiz y Pino has said, though he didn’t qualify for the ballot Saturday, that he’s staying in the race.

What about Kokesh?

There’s another candidate, on the Republican side, who might be interested in the Democratic Party’s ruling. Republican 3rd Congressional District candidate Adam Kokesh won the support of 19.5 percent of delegates at his party’s preprimary convention on Saturday.

The GOP decided after considering the situation that the number should not be rounded up, citing the provision in the election code stating that “every candidate receiving twenty percent or more of the votes” at the convention qualified for the ballot.

Kokesh has said he’s staying in the race even though the party ruled that he didn’t qualify for the ballot at the preprimary convention.

The state GOP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Update, 8:30 p.m.

Gonzales, the Democratic Party chairman, responded to Campos’ comments about “hurdles” and donors being “threatened” by saying that the state party has done nothing to try to keep Campos off the ballot.

“To the contrary,” Gonzales said, he made the decision earlier today to qualify Campos for the ballot “prior to any county party chair involvement” – despite what Campos claimed – and prior to the meeting of the judicial council. Gonzales said the council’s vote was simply to ratify his decision.

“I’m proud of the fact that we had a successful convention,” Gonzales said. “… At the end of the day, I’m glad that we were able to cite a law that allowed a candidate (Campos) access to the ballot.”

Meanwhile, state GOP spokeswoman Janel Causey said the party is “currently reviewing this matter” as it relates to Kokesh “to ensure that the party is in strict adherence with the law, and where applicable, rules, which determine when a candidate has reached the 20 percent threshold of delegate votes necessary to earn a place on the primary ballot.”

Bernard Madoff, left, from a picture taken in December

A major New Mexico  teachers’ union wants a Texas-based investment firm to pony up to $75 million for the losses New Mexico taxpayers’ experienced thanks to the spectacular fraud perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, according to a lawsuit that was unsealed Tuesday.

The National Education Association of New Mexico (NEA-NM) is taking aim at Austin Capital Management in an effort to recover three times the amount of money the state lost in what officials have called one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history.

According to the complaint, the Texas firm is guilty of professional negligence because it missed several “red flags” when it invested money from the state’s Educational Retirement Board and State Investment Council into a hedge fund that itself was heavily invested in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC.

All totaled, Austin invested 7.5 percent of its capital into funds controlled by Madoff and its clients, including the ERB and SIC, lost $180 million. The losses posted by the two New Mexico state agencies totaled $25 million combined when Madoff admitted in December to bilking investors of billions of dollars over several decades, according to the 25-page document.

“All of the red flags — mainly the smoothness of (Madoff’s) returns — showed that something was wrong with Madoff,” said John Wertheim, the attorney who filed the complaint for the New Mexico chapter of the NEA. “At the very minimum you would have avoided the investment because something was henky.”

The Educational Retirement Board and State Investment Council hired Austin Capital as a money manager. In essence, the Texas firm was trusted to invest the two agencies’ funds in other hedge funds, Wertheim said. One of those Austin Capital invested in was Tremont Group Holdings, which had invested billions with Madoff, according to the complaint. Published reports have put Tremont’s investment with Madoff at more than $3 billion.

When the Madoff fraud was exposed, hundreds of investors, including the Educational Retirement Board and State Investment Council, lost money.

The complaint charges that Austin missed several clues that all was not right with Madoff’s investment strategy, including Madoff’s “abnormally consistent” returns on investments and his practices were not open and transparent.

Also, according to the complaint, Austin Capital had long-standing business and personal ties to Madoff that made them less than effective watchdogs.

“It appears Austin Capital made a conscious choice to give Madoff in particular a free pass on due diligence, given that past and present executives of Austin Capital have maintained a cozy relationship with Madoff for years,” the complaint reads.

A former Austin Capital executive has maintained a close relationship with Madoff, the complaint says. The wife of the same executive published a vanity cookbook in 1996 with Ruth Madoff, Madoff’s wife.

Wertheim said he felt good about the state NEA’s chances for recovering money, saying that there are only a handful of lawsuits against Austin Capital across the country. Austin Capital also is part of a big Fortune 500 company – KeyCorp – which could pay the liabilities, he said.

It “has the ability to cover liabilities from the Madoff scandal,” Wertheim said of the Ohio-based KeyCorp.

The National Education Association of New Mexico represents 8,000 members who are public school teachers, other public school and higher educational public employees.

The Educational Retirement Board manages a multi-billion-dollar pension portfolio and has 63,698 active members, whose ranks range from bus drivers to university professors, and 31,192 retirees.

The State Investment Council’s main responsibility is to manage New Mexico’s multi-billion-dollar permanent trust funds. It also provides similar investment management services to twenty other state agencies and New Mexico political subdivisions.

The education association’s complaint was filed in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe last month, but unsealed Tuesday.

The NEA-NM complaint is the latest lawsuit filed under a 2007 state law that allows a private party — a citizen, association or organization — to sue in court to recover money if it believes taxpayer money was lost because of fraud.

Frank Foy, a former investment officer at the Educational Retirement Board, filed a complaint last year to recover $90 million that was lost because of a bad investment, something he and his attorney have alleged amounts to fraud.

Foy expanded his lawsuit Tuesday by dozens of defendants to its complaint, including Austin Capital and Tremont.

Of Austin, Foy’s complaint on Tuesday specifically called into question the firm’s claims that it had “special diligence and expertise that would protect the State of New Mexico’s investment and provide returns superior to the returns that the state of New Mexico would obtain investing directly in hedge funds.”

Foy has alleged in his complaint that a pay-to-play culture pervaded the state’s investment agencies under Gov. Bill Richardson.

Several defendants, including Richardson, State Investment Officer Gary Bland and Educational Retirement Board Chairman Bruce Malott, have vigorously denied Foy’s allegations.