The statewide system for tracking felons’ voting rights is in such disarray that the Secretary of State sent out a bulletin Oct. 1, warning county clerks that the state’s main voter database for convicted felons is unreliable.
The deadline for voter registration ended Tuesday.
“The electronic report is not the correct information we’re getting from the Corrections Department,” Secretary of State Mary Herrera said. “Therefore, I sent out to the county clerks and said if anybody happens to go in and needs to register and they completed their felony conviction/probation, contact us so we can look into it further. Because the information is not correct that we have.”
Missing information in the database could mean that convicted felons illegally retained their right to vote, or that released felons were marked as ineligible long after their voting rights should have been restored.
The omissions date as far back as 2000, Herrera said.
“It’s a possibility, yes, that if (ex-felons) were cleared in 2001, 2002 they’re still showing as convicted,” Herrera said.
On the other side, some individuals who have been convicted of a felony since 2000 and are still in the criminal system may be voting illegally.
Taos County Clerk Elaine Montaño said that would be her biggest concern.
“My main concern would be to let somebody vote that wasn’t supposed to,” Montaño said.
State law strips residents of their voting rights upon a felony conviction, but restores those rights when they have completed sentencing, probation or parole requirements.
Herrera’s office e-mailed county clerks Oct. 1, notifying them of the possible discrepancies. Clerks are the ones who actually register voters and administer elections.
Rio Arriba County Clerk Fred Vigil said the e-mail was the first he had heard of the discrepancy. He said it’s a problem because his office relies on the Secretary of State’s database to verify voter eligibility. The Social Security numbers of convicted felons are automatically flagged when new voter registrations come in, Vigil said.
“If the list is not current, how do we know?” Vigil said.
Santa Fe County Clerk Valerie Espinoza, who supported one of Herrera’s Democratic primary opponents in 2006, said the notification was badly timed. Along with the voter registration deadline, early in-person voting began Tuesday, and most county clerks are swamped.
“The timing to start creating confusion is very bad,” Espinoza said. “In reality, this could cause a felon who has satisfied his or her probation to appear ineligible. I think that would disenfranchise that particular voter.”
Asked about the timing, Herrera said clerks have been dealing with felon voting rights for years. Prior to 2006, legally they were the ones responsible for maintaining felony information, she said. And she questioned why clerks would have contacted the press instead of calling her.
“If it was a problem, how come I didn’t hear from any county clerks?,” Herrera asked.
Many of the clerks the SUN spoke to didn’t know there was a problem, and seem to have been taken aback by the news.
“I was real surprised that they wouldn’t have everything updated for us before the election,” Elaine Montaño said. “It was the Secretary of State’s office. I mean, that’s something that you need to stay on top of.”
How It Happened
Herrera said her office learned of discrepancies in August, when it received a report from the Corrections Department with information on felony convictions and releases reaching as far back as the 1990s. Herrera said her staff began checking the release information against voter rolls, to make sure that eligible ex-felons would be able to register if they so desired.
They made a surprising discovery, Herrera said.
“A lot of those were never entered as felons,” Herrera said. “They were not even on the computer. They were not showing at all — the ones we were trying to clear. Something happened prior to my administration that not all felons were entered.”
Former secretary of state Rebecca Vigil-Giron, who served from 1999 to 2006, said her elections bureau chief Ernie Marquez dealt directly with the voter database. Marquez, apologizing, said he couldn’t give direct answers either. The felony information went directly to information-technology staffers, he said.
“(The reports) were coming in, but I couldn’t tell you how often and I couldn’t tell you how it worked,” Marquez said.
Herrera said she doesn’t know how many felony records were incorrect or missing. And the recent discovery doesn’t mean that felons were never entered into the database. She said the primary source for conviction and probation information has been and still is paper documents, mailed to her office from the courts and the Corrections Department.
Herrera said her office is caught up on entering that paper data, and they were surprised to find that the electronic report from Corrections didn’t match up.
A Corrections spokeswoman did not comment.
When asked to explain the current situation, Herrera’s first statement was a shot at a former employee, Sarah Anderson-Gomez. She was the administrative assistant who, up until fall 2007, was directly responsible for entering new felony information into the voter file.
Herrera said after she took office, staffers found a one-year backlog of notices in Anderson-Gomez’s desk.
“So we caught up, going back a whole year,” Herrera said.
Herrera also blamed Anderson-Gomez’s departure, in 2007, for a drop-off in electronic reports from the Corrections Department. The Department had been sending the reports to Anderson-Gomez’s e-mail account, and after she left they didn’t ask for a new address until August 2008, Herrera said.
Anderson-Gomez has a different version of the events of 2007.
“Needless to say, it was a huge task,” Anderson-Gomez said. “Every day I probably received 50 to 100 of those (documents) in the mail.”
But Anderson-Gomez said she notified her bosses that she would be on maternity leave during spring 2007. When she left the reports were caught up, she said.
“I came back and it was in a shambles,” she said. “Everything that I had prepared was a mess.”
Anderson-Gomez said if Herrera had any concerns or questions, she could have asked.
““I think it’s really interesting that a month before the general election, they’re going to blame an employee who’s been gone for a year,” she said.”
Anderson-Gomez’s mother, Denise Lamb, is a former Secretary of State elections chief who now runs elections for Santa Fe County. Lamb called Herrera’s criticism of her daughter unbelievable and disgusting.
“I’ve had about enough of them,” she said. “This is just the lowest thing ever.”
WHAT THE LAW