On Monday, Nov. 24, election officials from Bernalillo County began their voting system check after last month's general election.
A post-election audit is required by law for every county in the state and carried out in association with a third-party auditor. Zlotnik and Sandoval, the auditor hired by the state this year, assigned a set number of precincts to each county for review by hand-count.
Due to the size of its population, Bernalillo County is typically assigned "the lion's share" of those precincts, Bernalillo County Bureau of Elections Administrator Nathan Jaramillo said. This year, 22 of 70 total precincts were selected from Bernalillo.
The hand-counts are compared to the machine-counted totals to ensure that every ballot is filled out and recorded correctly across specific races in the selected precincts.
New Mexico ranked at the top of the most recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2022 Elections Performance Index, scoring higher than the national average in administration of mail and in-person voting despite underperforming on voter turnout and registration metrics.
“We aren’t considered the best in the nation for nothing, and we aren’t considered the best in the state for nothing and I can’t think of a single county in the state that doesn’t agree with that,” Bernalillo County Clerk, Michelle Kavanaugh, told county employees at the Voting Machine Warehouse before they began the review on Monday morning. “We’re transparent, we’re ethical and we’re accessible.”
Elliott Wood is the news editor for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on X @dailylobo
