URGENT ACTION REQUEST ON NM ELECTION REFORM BILLS

CONTACT THE GOVERNOR AND YOUR LEGISLATORS NOW ON ELECTION REFORM:

Janet Resnick, Terry Riley and others from DFNM and NM Democratic Friends were at the NM Legislature yesterday pushing election reform measures. Both the Republican voter ID bill and Sen. Ortiz y Pino's election reform bill were tabled at the Senate Rules Committee. Meanwhile, Sen. Cisco McSorley will be introducing an election reform bill that Sonja Elison, Clo Barnaby and other voting reform advocates helped draft.

Governor Richardson held a press conference yesterday laying out what measures for election reform he intends to push via legislation introduced by Democrats. It was learned that Senate and House leadership will craft a bill using Richardson's proposals, along with parts of other election reform bills.

This process will be occurring today and tomorrow so it is imperative that we contact the Governor and our Legislators NOW to request the following be passed THIS SESSION:

1. Voting machines that produce VOTER VERIFIABLE PAPER BALLOTS. Using other types of auditable systems is not enough.
2. A quality assurance system that includes a required manual handcount in every precinct of a random 10 percent of the ballots, to see if they match the count being produced by the machines. If not, an automatic recount would be triggered. 
3. We need adequate funds allocated to county clerks to purchase new machines before the 2006 election.
4. These requirements and others are spelled out clearly in the election reform bill that will be introduced by Senator Cisco McSorley, which we support.

You can email Governor Richardson here:

You can find your legislators in the House and Senate here:

https://legis.state.nm.us/lcs/legislatorsearch.asp

Our folks at the Legislature yesterday had productive interactions in the Senate Rules Committee, with legislative analysts, at the press conference held by Governor Richardson where Ramon was present (with a sign), and during a conversation Terry had with the Governor in the hall. We have good reason to believe that we can achieve many of our goals concerning election reform IF we continue to keep the pressure on.

Some of our folks will be up at the Legislature again today distributing information about what we want in terms of election reform, and we must back them up via this email effort.

Here are links to front and back of the document they will be passing out, which was designed by Terry Riley. You can download them and pass them along to interested parties.

Thanks for you help!