New Mexico has earned a reputation for having some of the most secure elections in the country.
The Secretary of State is an elected official responsible for keeping New Mexico’s elections accessible and safe. That includes everything from pre-election testing to post-election audits, all of which can be accessed through the Secretary of State’s website.
Many Americans have concerns about election integrity ahead of the midterm elections.
“No matter how much chaos this administration continues to try to create, I know that my colleagues and I remain resolved in our commitment to ensuring every eligible voter has an opportunity to safely and securely cast a ballot in November,” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver wrote in a July 10 press release.
So what are the most important parts of how elections are conducted in New Mexico?
Long before the first votes are cast, election officials test the whole process from start to finish.
New Mexico’s elections only use paper ballots. It seems like a no-brainer but by using a recommended system for paper ballots, New Mexico is able to better audit and recount election results because the hard copies create a paper trail.
The paper ballot system in New Mexico started in 2004.
In addition to the paper ballot system, which is extremely difficult to hack, the tabulator machines that count the votes are offline and rigorously tested to produce consistent results.
Under state law, it’s illegal for the machines involved in totaling the votes to be connected to a computer network. So there’s no way it could be accessed via the Iinternet.
New Mexico’s “One Person – One Vote” system ensures that voter rolls are updated and monitored so voter fraud remains statistically low.
On top of that, there are poll watchers and election challengers who keep the whole system running.
After every election, the Secretary of State’s office conducts a thorough audit that double-checks that the results are accurate. For the post-election audits, random races or precincts are selected to have a hand count to compare the results calculated by the tabulation machines.
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