by Marisa Demarco
Daily Lobo
The governor signed several election reform bills into law Wednesday that will change New Mexico's standards for voter identification and third-party registration drives.
Voters will be required to state their names, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their dates of birth or show some form of physical identification before they vote.
Republican state Sen. Rod Adair said it is not enough.
"The people cried for voter ID, and they got no voter ID," he said.
The language of the bill changed the ID requirement very little, he said.
"It is not a voter ID bill," he said.
In the event that voters don't want to state their personal information, they will have to present physical evidence before voting.
Any photo ID, utility bill, bank statement, government check or paycheck is considered acceptable ID. Tribal government documents are also considered acceptable forms of ID.
On any of these documents, a person's address need not be his or her current address, said Eli Lee, co-owner of Soltari Inc., a consulting firm that has been working on election reform for the governor's office for three years.
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"We didn't penalize people like students, who often have different addresses on their identification," Lee said.
Gov. Bill Richardson defended the bills, saying they were in line with the federal Help America Vote Act.
"Don't listen to the critics who say this is voter ID light," Richardson said in a news release.
Ernie Marquez, state director of elections in the secretary of state's office, said the new procedure could slow the polls down.
"But we just don't know," he said.
Also included in the election reform bills are standards for third-party registration drives. Any drive not affiliated with a state or federal agency will have to register with the secretary of state.
"In the last election, we had many third-party people out there registering people who weren't of age or people who were already registered just for that bounty," Marquez said, referring to payments given to voter drive
employees for the number of forms they brought in.
Marquez said under the new law, the office will be able to monitor these drives more closely. An additional component of the law will require people who register voters to bring completed registration forms to the county clerk's office within 48 hours.
Marquez said this will alleviate some of the county clerks' problems. During the last election, he said, clerks received many registration forms from drives on the last possible day, causing a backlog of work. It will also help ensure voters receive their registration cards on time, he said.
"I could see that making sense, but I could also see that being a problem if people didn't meet the deadline," said Cyrus Gould, event organizer for the League of Pissed Off Voters, an organization that conducts registration drives. "There wouldn't be any way of informing people that they hadn't been registered. I could see that disenfranchising people due to the error of the person taking the registration form."
Other election reforms include:
Ballot design change
Funding will be provided to redesign
ballots to make them easier to
understand.
Maps of polling locations
Maps will have to be posted at all polling places to direct voters to their proper precincts.
Voting Machines
All voting machines will be required to produce a paper trail elections officials can check
Absentee ballots
County clerks will be allowed to count absentee ballots up to five days before Election Day.
Voters can drop off absentee ballots at their polling locations on Election Day.
Provisional ballots
Uniform procedures will be established statewide for determining which
provisional ballots are valid.
