LOVINGTON — A week after the June 2 primary election, Lea County Clerk Keith Manes said his office is still receiving absentee ballots.
“They’ve been trickling in,” Manes said on Wednesday. “If we don’t get those at the polling place, or in my office, by 7 p.m. on Election Day, we don’t count them. There were six the day after the election. Every day, if more come in, we just put them in an envelope and put them in the safe.”
By Wednesday, a total of 47 late absentee ballots had come to the county clerk’s office, not enough to make a difference in any of the races on the ballots. They were all marked with the date and time of receipt before being filed away.
“In fact, today (Wednesday, June 10) we got in some applications for a ballot,” Manes said, noting his staff checked the postmark. “But they were mailed yesterday (Tuesday, June 9), a week after the election. It wasn’t forwarded; they put it in the mail yesterday.”
In an effort to help ensure ballots didn’t get delayed in the mail system, Manes said local post office officials took extra precautions like not sending Lea County mailed ballots through Lubbock for redistribution.
“The Post Office was coordinating with all the election officials. Jal and Eunice were taking them to Hobbs. Then, Hobbs was driving them to Lovington,” Manes said. “They weren’t sending them to Lubbock. They were doing that the last three or four days before the election.”
More than a third (35%) of the ballots counted in the June 2 primary election were absentee ballots.
Of the 26,303 Lea County voters registered as either a Democrat, Libertarian, or Republican, the three recognized major parties in New Mexico, a total of 8,453 voted — about 32% of all registered voters in Lea County, the largest number for a primary election in recent years.
There were 2,972 absentee ballots counted, Manes said. He counted 25 absentee ballots that were turned in at the polling places before the deadline. Those ballots trickling into his office after the election deadline are not being counted.
In the COVID-19 months leading up to the election, the state toyed with an idea of an all-mail ballot that was rejected by the New Mexico Supreme Court. Then, state officials determined applications for an absentee ballot would be mailed to all voters registered in the three political parties with the voters allowed to send the applications back, receive a ballot and return it to the county clerk’s office.
All major-party-affiliated voters were sent an application, with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham reluctantly allowing in-person voting while strongly recommending against it.
Manes said the election generally went smoothly, but there were some people who didn’t vote because their voter registration didn’t show them as members of the party they wanted to vote in.
“The lesson learned is not to wait until the last minute,” Manes said, either to submit an absentee ballot or to check voter registration if planning to vote.
