New Mexico Speaks, Finally

New Mexico finally finished counting votes from the presidential election, and the winner is: Al Gore.

Just kidding. The ballots tallied last week were from the Nov. 2 election, of course, not the one four years ago. And the count took only two weeks, thank you very much, not 28 days like the last time. The state canvassing board certified the results Tuesday. President Bush defeated Sen. John F. Kerry by 5,988 votes.

OK, we already knew the election’s outcome regardless of the New Mexico results. Bush has already named members of a new Cabinet. Kerry has already melted back into the Senate. This election wasn’t another 2000, when, if Florida hadn’t hogged the limelight, New Mexico would have been even more infamous for a chaotic count that ended with Vice President Gore carrying the state by a mere 366 votes. (A lot of good it did him.) That was the year election workers decided to knock off at 9 p.m. on election night rather than stay up tallying votes. Mysteriously missing ballots turned up in a locked box in the back of a warehouse. A clerk misread a scribbled absentee ballot count as “120” instead of “620.”

“Only in New Mexico,” groaned the state’s old-timers.

This time around, pretty much everyone blamed the delay on the huge number of provisional ballots that had to be counted, and not only in New Mexico. Provisional ballots slowed the count in Ohio, Colorado and a few other states.

The 2002 federal Help America Vote Act sought to avoid a repeat of the Florida mess by requiring states to issue provisional ballots to citizens who say they are eligible but whose names do not appear on the precinct lists. But the new law didn’t specify how states were to verify the provisional ballots, and court interpretations varied widely, even within a single state. In two of New Mexico’s 33 counties, election workers had to read aloud the names and addresses of voters who cast provisional ballots, then explain why each vote was counted or disqualified. It was slow going.

This is one more example of why Congress needs to provide clear national standards for who qualifies to vote and how provisional votes should be handled. What happened in New Mexico could have happened elsewhere. Well, except for the 86 ballots discovered in a locked restroom of the Dona Ana County Courthouse two weeks after the polls closed.

At least they were from the 2004 election.