[EL] New Mexico Supreme Court keeps straight-ticket device off 2018 ballot

[Lonna Atkeson]

I went to the hearing and wrote up some of the data results that I had on New Mexico for the State, which they used during the hearing.

While I think you could look at this through a partisan lens and say that it’s just about helping your party, and if you do you shouldn’t support straight ticket voting, but an alternative way to consider this is whether or not this election reform makes voting more accessible.  

I had some over time voter public opinion responses to questions about using the straight ticket party and preferences for retaining or not retaining straight party ticket voting.  New Mexico used the straight party option since its inception thru 2010, and then Secretary of State Duran removed it in 2012 because she thought she had the authority to keep it or remove it.  As a Republican, she thought it helped Democrats so she removed it.

I thought I’d share a couple of the facts from the data with the group in the attached PDF.  It suggests that people who used straight party voting enjoyed using it and that it made voting more accessible to some groups.  Having watched voting since 2006, some voters have a really hard time with filling in the ovals, and the machines are clunky if you want to use the automark system, about 1/2 the people I watched try to use it have given up.  And, ballots can be very, very long.  In the hearing the judges mentioned 20 or 25 ballot questions, but the last midterm Bernco ballot had 80 questions on it.  That’s a lot of ovals!

There are many ways to consider the problem, partisan bias is only one of them. My experience is that some voters really benefited from the straight party option, and it made their voting more efficient.

Lonna









> On Sep 12, 2018, at 5:17 PM, Richard Winger <richardwinger at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> http://ballot-access.org/2018/09/12/new-mexico-supreme-court-will-decide-on-wednesday-september-12-about-straight-ticket-device/ <http://ballot-access.org/2018/09/12/new-mexico-supreme-court-will-decide-on-wednesday-september-12-about-straight-ticket-device/>
>  
> Richard Winger 415-922-9779 PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147
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