City cleans up for Tuesday election

Laurance Linford fills out his ballot for District 3 councilor in early runoff voting at the Gallup Municipal Building Thursday. Polls will be open today from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. and the runoff election for District 3 is Tuesday, March 29. (Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent)

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — While Mayor Bob Rosebrough and candidates Pat Butler and Harry Mendoza enthusiastically soil one another in the political mud puddle of the March 29 runoff election for the District 3 City Council seat, city and county staff have been cleaning things up.

Below the din of all that political posturing, city and county election workers are quietly trying to make sure the big day goes smoother than the March 1 general election.

According to various reports, the day of the general election was plagued by a variety of problems, some minor, others that might have changed the entire outcome.

City Clerk Ruth Ruiz, who oversaw the flawed election, refused to answer any questions, either about the general election or the runoff. Instead of commenting in a phone interview about reported election day problems, Ruiz hung up.

As City Manager Eric Honeyfield sees it, at least, there's plenty of room for improvement.

"I'm certain it will go smoother because there's not much that couldn't have gone better (during the general election)," he said of the runoff.

Honeyfield didn't blame any city or county staff for the difficulties, attributing them instead to the untimely accumulation of several factors.

Among them, he listed the recent redrawing of city district boundaries and the consolidation of polling places.

Both contributed in making Gallup Middle School a polling place for both the northside and southside races March 1.

In retrospect, the city manager confessed, "having two council districts share a polling place was probably a mistake."

"The reports I got back are not good about Gallup Mid," he said.

For one thing, choosing a school as a polling place caused a lot of congestion, in the morning especially.

Flawed voter rolls, according to Honeyfield, added to the trouble.

Because precincts had to be broken during the redistricting, he said, the new voter rolls for the two districts couldn't be generated by computers alone and had to be fine-tuned manually.

At best, it took the McKinley County Election Office longer to generate the official lists for the city. At worst, it placed some voters on the wrong list. And it certainly confused some voters along the boundaries who weren't sure which race they had a say in.

Add to that a county database with outdated addresses, allowing some residents to vote in a district they no longer lived in.

Even the city manager said he voted in the northside race when he should have cast his ballot in south side where he now lives because he failed to update his voter registration information after moving.

He and County Election Director Rick Palochak both pointed to lenient state laws that allow voters to go several years without having to update their registration information, laws Honeyfield likened to more of an "honor system."

So how did all that affect the results?

Honeyfield said it probably didn't disenfranchise a significant number of voters.

But he did estimate with the city clerk's help, he said that between six percent and 10 percent of the people who cast ballots did not cast them in the right race.

In the northside race, which incumbent Bill Nechero handily won with more than twice the votes of his closes challenger, it couldn't have made a difference.

The southside race, where less than 2.3 percent of the official vote separated the first- and third-place finishers, is another story. Even a six percent margin of error could have completely reshaped the runoff ballot, positions on which only the first- and second-place finishers Butler and Mendoza secured.

Honeyfield said that could have provided Mary Ann Armijo, who finished third, with grounds for challenging the results.

Armijo has made no effort to do so.

According to other reports, some voters in either district weren't allowed to vote at Gallup Mid, which was a polling place for both races, and some of the phone lines that should have been open during election day to City Hall were down.

There's not much the city or county can do about misregistered voters ahead of the March 29 runoff since that has to be taken care of well before the candidates even declare themselves. What they can do and have done Honeyfield said, is fix their own mistakes to the voter lists. Palochak said that's been taken care of.

The city should also be able to avoid some of the confusion of the general election with only one race to run this time around, Honeyfield added.

The city will have a chance to make things even simpler for itself and for voters when the mayor's seat is up for election in two years. At that point, Honeyfield believes, the City Council would be wise to consolidate polling places even more than it did this year, designating a single site per district.

"The fewer you have, the less problems you have," he said.

Placing multiple polling places in each district, the city manager said, is just a holdover from the days when automobiles weren't so abundant. As the limits on personal transportation ease, he believes, so should the election process adapt.

For now, southside voters may cast their ballots March 29 at either Red Rock Elementary School or Gallup Middle School.