Citizens of Bernalillo and Sandoval counties will get the chance to vote on whether they believe marijuana should be decriminalized, and Bernalillo County voters will also weigh in on a proposed tax to fund mental health services.
The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled after only a 30 minute deliberation on Friday that nonbinding advisory questions can be placed on statewide ballots, and ordered Secretary of State Dianna Duran to place the poll questions on the November election ballot.
However, whatever voters decide, the results will not change the law. Individual counties have the latitude to accept public opinion or go against it.
Last week Duran refused to place the questions on the ballot because, as her lawyer Rob Doughty argued, the state constitution does not expressly authorize nonbinding poll questions to be placed on a statewide ballot.
The Bernalillo County Board of Commission sued Duran, arguing that the Secretary of State does not have the authority to decide whether an item is placed on a ballot after a county decides to put it there.
Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who is running against Duran for Secretary of State, said she was pleased by the Supreme Court’s decision.
“Our statues are clear, and Dianna Duran violated those statutes,” Toulouse Oliver said in a statement. “Election officials cannot say what goes on the ballot and what doesn’t, and the Secretary of State may not interfere in the legal process for creating and printing ballots as she did in this case.”
Pat Davis of ProgressNow New Mexico, the organization that spearheaded the petition to put the marijuana question on the ballot, accused Duran of playing politics, and said ProgressNow will continue to campaign for the issue.
Duran said that allowing the poll questions to be placed on the ballot would set a precedent and could result in future ballots being cluttered with them.
This would cause the ballots to be unnecessarily long and complicated, with small type that is difficult to read, she said.
“Good luck putting the public opinion poll genie back in the bottle,” Duran said in a statement.
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While a nonbinding poll question has never appeared on a statewide ballot, this is not the first time Albuquerque voters have seen them.
In 2011, a question appeared on the Albuquerque municipal ballot asking whether the city should continue using red-light cameras to issue traffic citations. Fifty-three percent of voters said no, and the city ended the program.
Jonathan Baca is the news editor for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at news@dailylobo.com, or on Twitter @JonGabrielB.
