Inactive voters to be removed from registered list

If you haven’t voted in the last two major elections and still want to be a registered voter, you may want to make a visit or call the county clerk’s office before the next election.

According to County Clerk Rosalie Riley, the clerk’s office was instructed by Gov. Susana Martinez to remove from its list any voters who have not recently participated in an election.

“It was mandatory by the state,” Riley said. “We had 3,230 names on our list to purge, and we’ve only had eight on that list who were saved.”

The list, according to Riley, came from New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran.

Riley said once the clerk’s office was notified of the purge, a committee was formed to contact everyone on the list before any names were removed.

Election specialist Amber Roberts said the committee called each person on the list one by one after notification letters were sent from Duran’s office. Duran, Roberts said, is the only person in New Mexico that can authorize a purge.

Roberts said if voters had not voted since August 2012, they were on the purge list.

“A majority of them had either moved or changed their phone number and couldn’t be contacted,” Roberts said.

According to Roberts, all counties in New Mexico are doing the same thing as part of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

“New Mexico fell out of compliance with the NVRA process when under previous administration in 2007,” Roberts said. “I’m not sure who, but someone at the secretary of state’s office was not in compliance. They sent us guidelines for removing ineligible voters.”

According to an informational packet from the county clerk’s office, several states failed to comply with the NVRA, also known as the Motor Voter Act, and some challenged the act’s constitutionality.

While New Mexico had no cases raising claims under the act, it did fail to meet compliance, according to Roberts.

“The first step we had to do was not done in 2007 or 2009,” Roberts said, “and it resulted in the inability to remove ineligible voters in 2011 and 2013.”

The guidelines, which were sent out to all county clerk offices in New Mexico, give detailed instruction on how to remove ineligible voters:

First, confirmation notices were sent in the mail “90 to 120 days before a general election,” to voters who filed a change of address with the U.S. Post Office and to voters flagged as “inactive,” by Duran’s office.

The second step was to update voter status to “active,” once they responded or voted in a general election.

The third and final step was to remove voters from the voter file who did not respond to the notices mailed or vote in an election.

For voters who were purged and want to get back on the list as an active voter, Roberts said to call the county clerk’s office or come visit them in person to re-register.