Vote audit results still pending

Results of an independent audit of Roosevelt County’s November 2020 election were supposed to be released in July, according to a representative of the New Mexico Audit Force. But those results were still pending this week.

Erin Clements, who operates NMAF with her husband David, wrote in a text message on Monday that Roosevelt County is one of seven counties whose NMAF audit findings are now going to be combined into a single report.

Roosevelt County Clerk Mandi Park said she was told that Roosevelt County was the last of the counties to have its data analyzed by NMAF.

Clements said Monday she could not give an estimate of when the results of the seven-county analyses would be published, but, she said, “I expect to find similar issues that were uncovered in Otero County, such as an illegally high machine error rate, write-in vote programming errors, and folds illegally counted as votes.”

Park, however, said she is confident that the official election results she sent to the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office in November 2020 were accurate.

“I have confidence in the people who ran this election,” she said.

Ballots with irregularities like write-in votes and folds, she said, are kicked out of the machine to be counted by hand.

On June 22, about 20 persons guided by a mistrust of voting machines scanned copies of all 6,627 ballots cast by Roosevelt County voters in the 2020 election. Their purpose was to generate the data that the Clements are now analyzing. The ballots were made available through an Inspection of Public Records Act and were scanned in the basement hallway next to the clerk’s office in the Roosevelt County Courthouse.

NMAF made headlines last year as it sent volunteers door-to-door in Otero County to ask how residents voted in the 2020 election as part of what State Auditor Brian Colon called a “vigilante” audit. That unofficial audit also included a company called Echo Mail, which found no irregularities in the Otero County vote.

The issues NMAF found with the Otero County ballots, Clements wrote in a text message, resulted from NMAF’s examination of “the paper ballots, Dominion (voting machine)-created ballot images, digital cast vote records of the election, absentee ballot envelopes, statewide voter rolls from the SOS (New Mexico Secretary of State), state and county canvass, and tabulator tapes.”

Clements also said an “eminently qualified nation-state vulnerability expert” watched as the Otero County Clerk’s office operated the machines and noted that the same slot used to print ballots was used in tabulating ballots.

Park said Roosevelt County uses a different machine to tabulate ballots than the machine that prints them.

Tate Turnbough, chair of the Roosevelt County Democratic party, said he is confident the county’s reported election returns are accurate.

He praised both New Mexico’s Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, and Park, who is a Republican, for their conscientiousness in assuring that elections are run properly and counted accurately.

He said he was uncertain about NMAF’s motives, though, especially in Roosevelt and Otero counties, which both voted overwhelmingly Republican in federal and local contests in 2020.