The sad state of voter registration in New Mexico

While Erik asked me to participate on this blog to write about Mexico, I thought I’d make a quick post about New Mexico (sorry Erik if I'm already breaking the rules!) while I continue working on my first post about Mexican politics. (Stay tuned for an analysis of the proposed reforms of Mexico’s national oil company, PEMEX).

In the last two days I’ve been approached twice by people trying to register new voters in Albuquerque who have asked me to fill out another registration form even after I tell them I’m already registered. The second time it happened, I asked the guy who he was working for and he told me ACORN.  Not only was I annoyed by this attempt to get me to fill out another form, but also by the unprofessional appearance of these two individuals. Neither of them had any visible identification for whom they worked for (a organizational t-shirt would have sufficed). Since voter registration forms require sensitive information (social security numbers), I find it frustrating that third party voter registration efforts would think that sending out people that look unprofessional is the best way convince people to hand over information that could potentially be used for identity theft. I probably sound like a grumpy old man here, but voter registration should be taken more seriously, and a simple dress code with an ID badge is not too much to ask for. I don’t want to lay all the blame here on one organization, I know similar problems existed here in 2006 in the Democratic campaign for Patricia Madrid.

However, ACORN has come under a lot of heat for the actions of some of its temporary workers here in New Mexico for providing misleading information, as well as in Virginia and Pennsylvania for falsifying voter registration forms. A lot of problems, including my own experience, seem to stem from the organization’s requirement that workers meet some quota before being paid for their work, leading some of them to submit fraudulent registration forms in order to get paid. Some of these problems are not necessarily related to the organization, as a number of non-partisan groups are filing a lawsuit against the state of New Mexico for particularly restrictive laws that require organizations involved in voter registration to submit forms within 48 hours of being collected in bundles of 50. This particular law seems to encourage these groups to gather as many forms as possible in a very short amount of time. The other problem, which does not seem to be mentioned all that often, is that political campaigns, ballot counting, election administration, and voter registration efforts have to typically rely on a particular subset of the population who are unemployed, work for temp agencies, or for some other reason are not regularly working. It is great that our political process can give temporary work to people who need it, but the consequence is many critical aspects of our elections are run by the least educated part of the population. I am not suggesting that these people should not be participating, but that maybe a recognition of this situation could lead to some better training by organizations involved in the electoral process. Ideally, we could do away with all this voter registration controversy and get rid of voter registration entirely as in North Dakota or move towards same-day registration as in Wisconsin and Minnesota.