Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day, and volunteers were on campus, registering new voters and campaigning for the decriminalization of marijuana.Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day, and volunteers were on campus, registering new voters and campaigning for the decriminalization of marijuana.
DecrimNM, an organization affiliated with ProgressNow New Mexico and the Drug Policy Alliance, registered more than 100 new voters at the Duck Pond, said campaign worker and recent graduate Rachael Maestas.
The group also received around 300 pledges from students to vote for the advisory question to decrease penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana to a $25 fine.
“Now that it is officially on the ballot, we are here in full force to get the vote out and really empower student voters specifically,” Maestas said.
What made it onto the ballot is a nonbinding advisory question, meaning that the results of the election will not be enough to change the law. Rather it will send a message to elected officials, letting them know what the people of Bernalillo County want, Maestas said.
“We’ve never hidden that fact,” she said. “We know it’s an advisory question, and if people are asking for more information, we tell them that this is just a suggestion to our elected officials, and will set the stage for what’s going to happen in this state in the future,”
Patrick Davis is executive director of ProgressNow New Mexico, the group that initiated the original petition to get the question on the ballot. He was on campus all day helping to register voters and sign up volunteers for the campaign.
Davis said despite the political battles and legal wrangling around the issue, the campaign has never been stronger.
“This has been like the ballot initiative that won’t die. It’s sort of been a zombie ballot initiative,” he said. “We got all the signatures and then the city messed it up. Then the city council passed it and the mayor vetoed it. And so we’ve been back and forth, but every time more and more people come up and say ‘hey, we really want this to happen.’”
Freshman engineering major Sean Stovall will be voting for the first time this November, and he said decriminalizing pot was one of the main reasons he decided to register.
“I think it’s really good. It’s going to get a lot of people out of trouble, help people express how they feel and give people the rights that they originally had in the United States,” he said.
Because of their success Tuesday, Maestas said DecrimNM will be on campus every day for the rest of the week and will continue campaigning at least once a week until the election, at football games, at performances or anywhere else students will be gathered.
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Davis said UNM is an important battleground for the cause, because young people will be essential to get the 600,000 votes needed to reach a majority in the county.
“If you look at what’s happened in Colorado and Oregon, a lot of it has centered around college campuses. Students are saying ‘we want to participate in this,’ and this is an issue that they can organize around,” Davis said. “If it’s not going to happen here, it’s not going to happen in the rest of the county.”
Maestas said she hopes people will not be discouraged by all the setbacks this initiative has faced, and regardless of their opinion on the issue, she hopes everyone will exercise their most important right and make their voices heard.
“I think there is power in numbers among young people and we do have a voice, we have opinions and the right to voice them, and that’s through voting. People who try to take that away, I think it’s terrible,”
Davis said the group is looking for volunteers to make phone calls, knock on doors and continue registering more voters.
Jonathan Baca is the news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com, or on Twitter @JonGabrielB.
