Republicans and Democrats spar over the vote tallying, bringing at least one call of apology.
By Shea Andersen
Tribune Reporter
ballot-counting process tries the patience of politicians, their public dialogue has become by turns testy, suspicious and occasionally conciliatory.
On Thursday, Sen. Pete Domenici, an Albuquerque Republican, held a news conference with Republican attorney Pat Rogers and tore a strip off the New Mexico Secretary of State, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, a Democrat.
"We have great concerns about the failure of the Secretary of State's Office to be able to report basic numbers to provide the voters, as well as the media, confidence in this election," Rogers said.
"Every election, the same things happen," Domenici said. "We know we aren't prepared, but we don't get prepared."
On Friday, Vigil-Giron said she'd had enough.
"I'm really concerned about how ignorant people like Pat Rogers and the senator are trying to create havoc, by suggesting that," Vigil-Giron said. "Let the counties and their staff work, cease and desist, and shut up.
"They've gotten into the business of local election officials, and I'm here to defend them," Vigil-Giron said.
It didn't end there.
Greg Graves, New Mexico Republican Party executive director, was quoted in The Santa Fe New Mexican on Friday as saying he believed Gov. Bill Richardson and Vigil-Giron were conspiring to steal the election in New Mexico.
"I believe this is a conspiracy," Graves said.
Democrats howled.
"The ridiculous, unsubstantiated charges leveled by Graves are without foundation in fact and represent another example of his personal inability to work in a bipartisan manner to achieve an accurate vote count for the voters of New Mexico," said John Wertheim, chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party.
Domenici, sensing that one of his own had perhaps gone too far, called Richardson on Friday to apologize.
"I told the governor that I disassociated myself from, and disavowed, the remarks by Mr. Graves," Domenici said. "I have also called Mr. Graves and told him that I believe his allegations were false and tended to inflame tensions when we should all proceed openly and calmly."
Graves wouldn't comment Friday.
"There's no comment from this camp on that letter," said Ashleigh Thompson, spokeswoman for the New Mexico Republican Party.
Meanwhile, John Kerry has conceded, President Bush is still president and will be for four more years, but who won the now-irrelevant electoral prize of New Mexico remains unknown, at least according to the final official source in such matters, the secretary of state.
Vigil-Giron said that while the national media have long since called New Mexico for Bush, the important job of counting ballots won't be done until Nov. 12, when the county clerks are required to turn in final tallies to the state.
Then her office will review those tallies. They have until Nov. 23, when she, Richardson and New Mexico Supreme Court Chief Justice Petra Maes meet to certify the results.
She said the 33 county clerks now working to certify provisional ballots and count absentee ballots should be given the time they need to make an accurate count of the votes cast in Tuesday's election.
According to the vote-count update on the secretary of state's Web site about 6 a.m. today, Bush, with 348,125 votes, led Kerry, who had received 341,186 votes, for a margin of 6,939 votes.
The Associated Press, through an independent polling of county clerks, put the count at Bush, 372,215, Kerry, 363,627, for a margin of 8,588.
Clerks' staff across the state are still plowing through stacks of provisional ballots, which numbered in the thousands.
Some of the criticism of Vigil-Giron centers on the near-ubiquitous presence of her face on television during the election.
The television ads, which were aimed at educating voters about voting processes, were paid for with federal money given to all states after the signing of the federal Help America Vote Act in 2002.
In all, Vigil-Giron said, New Mexico received about $19 million from the federal government under the act.
About $5 million was used right away, to help build a new statewide voter database system, Vigil-Giron said. That effort is ongoing.
An estimated $12 million likely will be used to help counties buy new voting machines that are accessible for handicapped voters. Those machines, Vigil-Giron said, should be in place by the 2006 governor's election.
But to the average voter, the most visible expenditure was the ads. Vigil-Giron estimates she spent about $1 million on the ads.
"People know who their secretary of state is now," Vigil-Giron said. "They now understand their most fundamental right to vote."
And people apparently got the message about the availability of provisional ballots. As of Friday, 18,000 such temporary ballots remained to be validated and counted, according to Vigil-Giron's office.
The ballots are given to any voter who shows up at a polling place on Election Day but whose name is not found on the rolls of registered voters. The paper provisional ballots are offered to them as a way to record their vote, but there is no guarantee that vote will be counted.
If the person's personal information is not found on the state's voter rolls, their provisional ballot will not be certified and won't count.
The provisional ballots must be verified and counted by hand.
Vigil-Giron said she was so determined that people get to vote on the provisional ballots that she sent a memo to all the county clerks on Election Day, telling them if they ran out of provisional ballots to make photocopies and "get them out."
But the avalanche of absentee ballots and provisional ballots has made the counting, and the final result in New Mexico's tight election, slow in coming.
For now, the Bernalillo County warehouse where the ballot-counting is taking place, is a dull but tense tableau of elections workers tallying votes. They do so under the watchful eye of partisan poll monitors and challengers, and the media.
"It's not like I'm holding out hope that the count will change," said Matt Farrauto, spokesman for the New Mexico Democratic Party, as he sat at the warehouse Friday.
Vigil-Giron said New Mexico is not alone in provisional ballot-counting, as every state has offered the ballots this year.
"Every state is going through the same exercises that I'm going through this year," Vigil-Giron said. "The media predicted this (election), not me."
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