Judge eyed on ballots

Shea Andersen - November 10, 2004

A Republican judge in one voting precinct has some explaining to do, Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera said this morning.

As the weary clerk's staff continued to examine provisional ballots, attention gathered on one batch in which the disqualified ballots all were Democrat and those that qualified were Republican, Herrera said.

Herrera's staff had been combing through 2,000 "questionable" ballots, which led to the certification of 1,400 of them.

Those that weren't certified bothered her staff. The main reason for disqualifying them, she said, was because an affidavit testifying to the voter's identity, which is supposed to be signed by a presiding judge, was not in the outer of two envelopes that are supposed to be turned in to election workers. That rule was prescribed by New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron.

Today Herrera said a Republican presiding judge in one particular precinct was in charge of several hundred bad ballots. The problem, Herrera said, was that the bad ballots, with affidavits inside, were largely Democrats. The good ones were for Republican voters.

"It made us kind of sick," Herrera said. "It was too obvious."

Read More >>