NMSU Assistant Professor Dr. Daniel Gomez discusses his research on local voter turnout. Here's a transcript of his conversation with KC Counts:
KC Counts:
Dr. Gomez, tell me about how you began your deep dive into New Mexico's new semi-open primary voting system.
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
So 2 tracks here. One, I had a vested interest in some recent reforms. Permanent absentee status, right? This allows any voter to sign up once and get their ballot mailed to them directly for every single statewide election. This is something that I took advantage of myself when I was in graduate school in California, actually, and I found it very convenient, very easy. It was just something that I thought more states should look at. So when I saw that New Mexico did so, I was intrigued to see what were some of the effects. The second track is I'm doing this in conjunction with the League of Women Voters of Southern New Mexico here in Dona Ana County. They want to understand a little bit more about how can we be effective at get out the vote campaigns? And one of those ways to learn that is to do a better understanding of how the voting rules work and how we can take advantage of them.
KC Counts:
Did you mainly focus on the permanent absentee balloting?
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Yes, that was sort of my initial focus, specifically because it was something that was near and dear to my heart. Now, there are some other changes that I did focus on as well. One more, a little bit more recent, the change in primary status. So before, New Mexico had what we called a closed primary system, where you had to be a registered Democrat or a registered Republican to vote in your party's primary. Recently, we've decided to change that. We have a semi-open system. So now if you're a registered independent or a member of one of the non-major two parties, you can select which of the two primaries you want to vote in. This allows voters that may not have otherwise been inclined to vote the opportunity to express their preferences just like everyone else. So in doing some exploration of that, I did see that as the other big structural change worthy of some exploration.
KC Counts:
Okay, so tell me how you went about collecting your data.
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Well, not everybody knows this, but voter records are public. They are public information. All you need to do is drop by the Secretary of State or even the county office, and you can get voting records for a small fee, of course. So what I did was I got voting records for Dona Ana County specifically for the primary elections in 2020, 2022, and 2024, and the most recent ones in 2026. And essentially what I did was I just looked at the number of voters, compared how many voters were in 2020, 22, 24, 26, and then specifically looking do the numbers of non-party affiliated people, people who say, I don't want to be part of the two major parties.
KC Counts:
Because those would be all new in 2026.
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Exactly, brand new. You could have that status beforehand, but you couldn't vote. Now, what we do see is, of course, huge numbers of people took advantage of this and engaged in the primary. We saw nearly as many decline to say voters, which is people who don't identify their party, as we did registered Republicans in the state. This is a pretty big number in our county for the first time.
KC Counts:
And so what do you take away from that?
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
The simplest way to think about this is the easier you make it to vote, the more people will vote. And if we believe that voting is something that every citizen should do, I think we have a responsibility to make it as easy as possible for every citizen that we want to vote.
KC Counts:
Obviously, there's going to be pushback from folks who say, well, the easier we make it to vote, the easier we make it for people to cheat at voting. We're told time and time again that there's really no evidence of widespread voter fraud, but something like a permanent absentee ballot, for example. Someone moves, passes away, and maybe those records don't get updated. What do you know about the election security angle of all of that?
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
So voter fraud is one of those boogeymen that exists, but it's much more overblown than most people think it is. When we do see actual voting fraud, it's not someone trying to cheat an election or rig the system. It's exactly what you identified here, right? Someone who forgot to update their registration status. Someone who didn't update when they moved and they're voting off of a different address. Permanent vote by mail status, that can cause some issues for someone's ballot to go to their former address. But just like everything else via mail anymore, you can set up forwarding through the post office to make sure you get your mail. And just like everything else around politics and elections, this is very much a personal choice and a personal matter. I trust individuals who are attentive and active in politics to maintain their registration status throughout their life.
KC Counts:
What other things stood out to you in the course of your research that you want to share?
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
One thing that I especially found compelling was that in some of the more rural areas of the county, it's like Anthony or Hatch, we do see some pretty obvious upticks in the use of absentee voting, absentee ballots in every election, right? One of the things we saw was in 2020, huge voter turnout in primaries because everyone was encouraged to vote by mail, vote absentee, and it dips down. But we do see, once we made it legal, once we made it easier for these people who are far out, really rural areas of the community, make it easier to vote for them, they do engage. They do take the opportunity.
KC Counts:
You think in terms of people who, you mentioned, remote, so it's hard to get anywhere, but also there are so many people who can't so easily, don't have the option.
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Sure. Election day is a federal holiday. You can take the day off to go and vote, but you're not expecting to get paid for that day. Not all of us can take an entire day off just to go vote and lose a paycheck. Not all of us have the capacity to commute far distances, things like that. So there's lots of opportunities here for the most disadvantaged, the people who already had it hardest to vote to make it a little easier for them.
KC Counts:
So can you give us a sense in terms of kind of the numbers of increases, crystallize that data for us a little bit?
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Sure. So roughly we're talking anywhere between, depending on whether we're looking specifically at the county or at the state, we're looking at anywhere from a couple of 100 voters in, say, Anthony. We're going from, oh, I don't know, five or six that have used absentee ballots in the past to the most recent election. We're talking 250. And I know that number doesn't seem huge, but remember, we're talking about Anthony. There's not a whole lot of people in there to begin with. So we're seeing some numbers actually in terms of absentee match the numbers we would see for early voting, right? So we're taking advantage of those. So to crystallize the numbers again, anywhere from a couple 100 at the lowest levels to anywhere from 10,000 more voters at the state level.
KC Counts:
Okay. As we head into the general election in November, what kind of efforts would you encourage on the part of those whose responsibility it is to help get people to the polls based on your research.
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Yeah, so a strategy like this is more about structure, right? Educating people on the new rules that exist out there rather than convincing them this is an important election or they have something on the line. This is really about teaching people, take advantage of the new rules that are out there that you can benefit from and you can engage in politics with in a more robust way. So the number one thing I'd encourage is to do, don't think of this as just get out the vote. This is creating new voters potentially for the rest of their life. So it does take a slightly different approach, slightly different strategy. And above all, reach out to those that typically get left out of these get out the vote campaigns. Those are the voters that are most likely to benefit from something like this.
KC Counts:
How does someone vote so that at the end of their voting experience, they knew that they did the best they could for their own interests and those whom they care about?
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
There are lots of reasons that someone might use to pick whether to vote for candidate A or B, yes or no on a bond. And the beauty of America is they're all justified. Someone flipping a coin to pick a candidate, their vote counts as much as someone who spends hours and hours of meticulous research. I encourage voters to take advantage of local organizations. The League of Women Voters of Southern New Mexico puts out a voter guide. That's A top-notch one. I encourage you to check that out. All voters informed were better off.
KC Counts:
In the course of your work, do you engage much with voters?
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
I encourage all of my students to vote. Voting is generally one of the most important actions we can take, and increasingly one of the easiest ones, at least in our state. My work, especially in and out of the classroom, is focused on building better citizens. So voting is absolutely a part of that, but by no means should be the be all, end all.
KC Counts:
So one thing that we've been hearing a lot about is President Trump's proposed Save America Act that would, according to many, make it harder to vote, right? So what are the stakes in terms of state control over elections versus the federal government's interference? And what is your thought in terms of how all of that is playing out right now?
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Sure. So there's two ways to look at this. And sort of the traditional way is that elections are the state's responsibility. We set the country up this way so that no one president, no one member of Congress, no one group can influence the election so much that it disrupts the entire country. We don't have one election, we have 50 small ones. So on the one hand, there's some good protection about that. It's harder to manipulate 50 elections than it is to manipulate 1. Now, it's not unreasonable, on the other hand, to say when we are voting for people that make decisions that affect the lives of everyone in the country, shouldn't everyone in the country be playing by the same rules when we conduct those elections? So admittedly, there is some reasonable argument to be made that we should be standardizing the election rules at the federal level. State elections should absolutely stay within the hands of the state. And fundamentally, the question we need to grapple with is who should decide what rules voters play by, the governor of the state they live in or the president in Congress thousands of miles away?
KC Counts:
Well, you've left us more to think about now.
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Always love to do that.
KC Counts:
All right, Dr. Daniel Gomez, an MSU assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, Public Law, and Administration. You can find Dr. Gomez's local viewpoints submission on our website, krwg.org, and read a little bit more about his research. Thanks for coming in to talk to us about it.
Dr. Daniel Gomez:
Thank you for having me.
You can find Dr. Gomez's Local Viewpoints entry right here.
