Poll volunteers: Some registration forms not delivered to county clerk

by Ardee Napolitano
news@dailylobo.com
Some voter registration forms gathered on campus didn’t make it to the County Clerk’s office.
Volunteers at the polling station in the Student Union Building on Tuesday said some voter registration organizations that gathered registration forms from students forgot to turn them in.
County Clerk Public Information Officer Liz Hamm said people whose registration forms were not delivered to the office before the Oct. 9 voter registration deadline will have to use provisional ballots, which won’t be counted until weeks after today’s election. ballots will not count until at least two weeks after Election Day because polls need to verify whether provisional-ballot voters are actually registered,
Hamm said that because there were various organizations that registered voters, the County Clerk’s office doesn’t know which organization forgot to turn in forms, or if an organization indeed forgot to turn forms in.
Hamm said provisional ballots serve as temporary ballots for voters who could not receive regular ballots upon their arrival to polling locations. She said the deadline for voter registration in New Mexico was Oct. 9.
“If someone goes to vote and they think they are registered, they can vote with provisional ballots,” she said. “The provisional ballots are researched just to see if the particular person is a registered voter and if those ballots count.”
Because provisional ballots don’t count until verification process is completed, Hamm said that election results may not be final. She said that even if a candidate wins a race, if enough provisional ballots were cast for the rival candidate, the election’s results will be reversed.
But Hamm said election result reversal is very rare, and it has not happened in New Mexico before.
“It’s a really tight race,” she said. “I don’t know at this point if anything would be that close that the provisional ballots would decide who wins the race.”