Some Republican-led legislatures across the nation are already working to redraw voting district maps after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s congressional districts gave too much weight to race, dealing what critics see as a blow to the federal Voting Rights Act.
Officials with the nonprofit good government group Common Cause’s New Mexico, Texas and Arizona chapters decried the decision in a town hall meeting Thursday evening. For decades, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act restricted states from using district maps that watered down minority groups’ voting power. Critics have said the Supreme Court decision could enable gerrymandering.
Mason Graham, Common Cause New Mexico’s policy director, lauded the New Mexico Legislature for adopting a state Voting Rights Act and a Native American Voting Rights Act, which allows tribal governments to designate buildings where people without traditional mailing addresses can vote and create new precincts when political maps are redrawn, in 2023.
However, Graham said the SCOTUS decision could still have repercussions for federal representation in a majority-minority state like New Mexico.
“Section 2 was designed to protect the people who are right here in New Mexico,” he said during Thursday’s meeting. “Nearly one out of every five Hispanic-majority could be essentially eliminated. Hispanic New Mexicans represent half the population and Indigenous communities who just received these protections are now being put directly in the crosshairs.”
A quiet start to early voting Early voting began on Tuesday and hit a few snags for folks utilizing same-day registration.
According to updated information the Secretary of State’s Office provided to Source New Mexico, six counties encountered issues with the same-day voter registration system because the state’s “website firewalls incorrectly determined that traffic between some county computers and the website was unsafe,” and blocked the traffic.
Lindsey Bachman, director of Communications, Legislative and Executive Affairs for the office, told Source NM via email on Thursday that four other counties reported problems with passwords and setups for the same-day registration systems on the first day of early voting, while yet another three reported problems, for the first time, with accounts that had been set up weeks prior.
The impact of all those problems appears minimal. According to the first round of data for the election, 90 people in total across the state’s 33 counties have used same-day voter registration thus far to cast ballots. Of those, 43 were Democrats; 31 were Republicans and 16 were Decline to State or Independent voters.
In total, as of Friday morning, 6,950 ballots had been cast, mostly through early voting, with about 3% via absentee ballots. Of New Mexico’s approximate 1.4 million voters, just under 65,000 of them have requested absentee ballots for this election. May 19 marks the last day voters can request an absentee ballot for the primary election.
As for the initial ballots cast on the first week of voting, roughly 55.5% were from Democratic voters; just under 35% were from Republicans; and approximately 9.5% — 664 ballots — came from decline to state, or independent voters, exercising their right to participate in the primary as independent voters for the first time (six votes were cast by minor party voters). While early voting is currently confined to county clerks’ offices, more polling places will open up on May 19.
For more information about the primary election, be sure to check out Source NM’s Primary Election Voter Guide.
Experts weigh in on New Mexico’s first-ever semi-open primary KUNM devoted its weekly hour-long discussion program to the state’s first-ever semi-open primaries, which will allow voters unaffiliated with a political party to cast ballots in either the Democratic or Republican primary election.
Panelists included Molly Swank, executive director of Common Cause; Sila Avcil, executive director of NM Voters First; Lindsey Bachman, the Secretary of State’s director of Communications, Legislative and Executive Affairs; and Michael Thorning, director of the Washington D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center’s Structural Democracy Project.
The experts explained how the semi-open primary will work, discussed recent state and county election problems, and fielded questions from voters, including a member of the Green Party and a voter concerned about dark money’s influence in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
Video of the conversation can be found here.
NM Secretary of State candidates decline to seek all-mail systemIn addition to early voting, Tuesday also marked the first day that county clerks across New Mexico could mail absentee ballots.
New Mexico requires voters who wish to vote by mail to request absentee ballots. Some states, such as Oregon and Washington, automatically send such ballots. The two Democratic candidates for secretary of state recently said, however, that even though vote-by-mail states have high rates of participation, they would not implement a similar system in New Mexico. In addition to the likely years of voter education needed for such a change, they cited concerns about the federal uncertainty surrounding mail-in voting.
Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order restricting mailed ballots, despite voting by mail himself in Florida. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez fought the order in court alongside other states.
In March, Trump issued another executive order allocating unprecedented powers to the postal service in elections. New Mexico has also joined other states in challenging that order’s constitutionality.
That federal uncertainty renders it “infeasible, for the moment,” Santa Fe County Clerk Katharine Clark told Source NM.
“We want voters to feel very confident that despite the changes happening, voting by mail is still a great way to vote,” Clark said. “And we’re gonna do everything in our power to ensure that we are getting ahead of any challenges, we’re communicating with our regional managers in advance, checking in with our local postmasters to make sure they’re doing a last day sweep of all the ballots.”
Doña Ana County Clerk Amanda López Askin said that changing a voting system to an all mail-in ballot could take “at least a decade,” and recalled resistance to other changes for electoral systems such as ranked-choice voting.
“There is absolutely no reason people should not be voting by mail if that is what they want to do. The system is sound and it is monitored and led by people who are doing everything they can to make sure that they’re community’s votes are counted,” López Askin said. “So I have full faith in the system.”
The U.S. Postal Service published in its April 30 guide to election mail that it is “committed to its role” in the 2026 elections and will “ensure the dependable and timely delivery,” of ballots.
Dem land commissioner candidates applaud new Torrance County wind farm New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard this week announced she’d signed an agreement to develop a roughly 10,000-acre wind farm on state trust land in Torrance County.
The agreement with AFE Cedarvale Wind LLC enables what could become the second-largest wind farm on state lands that produces enough power to serve more than 60,000 homes. The project will also generate nearly $100 million in revenue for public schools over the agreement’s lifetime, according to an announcement from the State Land Office.
All three Democratic land commissioner candidates competing in the primary election told Source NM they support the new wind farm and, if elected, would like to continue building renewable energy projects on state trust lands.
Diversifying the office’s revenue streams, which are now heavily reliant on oil and gas royalties, is one of the top priorities for all three Democrats, they recently told Source NM.
Jonas Moya, a Tucumcari rancher and former director of the New Mexico Farm Service Agency under President Joe Biden, said New Mexico needs to “lean into” renewable energy projects like the Torrance County wind farm, especially given President Donald Trump’s efforts to hamper renewable energy projects on the federal level.
“If I know anything about rural, eastern New Mexico, the wind is always blowing,” he said.
Juan de Jesus Sanchez III, an outdoorsman and former political director for U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), said that, while he wasn’t familiar with the exact details of the Torrance County agreement, he is “generally for wind and solar on state trust land.”
State Rep. Matthew McQueen (D-Galisteo) called the announcement “fantastic news.”
“The commissioner is working hard and doing the right things, and I hope to build on her success,” he said. “Renewable energy is the future.”
