The headline below appeared in the 1966 Albuquerque Journal following the November general election.
For years, New Mexico’s Rio Arriba County has been tagged as the election irregularity poster child, most notably during the tenure of long-time political boss Emilio Naranjo.
Naranjo, who died in 2008 at the age of 92, was a true political patron who at one time or another served as the county’s Democratic Party Chairman, County Manager, County Sheriff and many years as State Senator. His leadership was frequently surrounded by controversy, especially involving voting practices in the northern New Mexico county.
What made me think of Naranjo was an article in this week’s Albuquerque Journal, which said that New Mexico’s elections are “conducted more reliably than any other state in the nation.” That is according to The Elections Performance Index, a project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that attempts to measure efficiency and purity of election administration in each state.
I’m proud to say that I might have been part of that “reliability” since I have served as a volunteer election clerk for the last general and last special election in Dona Ana County. I’ve signed up again to work the upcoming primary election in June. My experience has been that everything is above board and I’ve seen no evidence of election irregularity.
That apparently always wasn’t the case in the state, particularly in Rio Arriba County.
I did a search on Newspapers.com for “Rio Arriba County election irregularities” and came up with what seemed to be an endless supply of articles on the subject.
In 1906, an article in the Santa Fe New Mexican said that the final voting tally for a Congressional race for the Territory of New Mexico could not be completed because results from Rio Arriba County were not yet available. (Lincoln County, another political bad boy of that era, also had not submitted its final tally.)
The article noted that the results from Rio Arriba would determine the outcome of the Congressional race, but “for inexplicable reasons, results from that county have not come in any reliable form…”
Two stories from the 1976 general election caught my eye. One quoted New Mexico Chief of Police Martin Vigil saying that 15 additional State Police officers had been assigned to watch for irregularities at voting locations in Rio Arriba County. After the election, there was this lead in an Albuquerque Journal story:
“Rio Arriba County ballots were impounded — as usual — in the general election Tuesday.”
Another article in the Albuquerque Journal following a general election said a voting machine in Chimayo had an inoperative lever for a candidate who was not supported by the Naranjo camp.
But voting irregularities were not unique to Rio Arriba County in New Mexico. I worked in a peripheral role during a campaign in Dona Ana County the early 1980s and remember hearing conversations about “walking around money” that was paid by some political figures to get out the vote for certain candidates — fortunately not the one I was supporting.
Are things finally on the up and up in Rio Arriba County? As recently as 2002, it appears that might not have been the case. An Albuquerque Journal editorial noted that 360 absentee voting ballots had been submitted in Rio Arriba County for the upcoming primary election, compared to just 100 Bernalillo County with 13 times as many residents.
Even if shady things are still going on in Rio Arriba County elections (which the MIT report seems to refute) the good thing is that I don’t think the county has enough votes to impact a national election.
aero-cordero.com 