The Las Cruces City Council reviewed proposed changes to the current election process during a work session Monday.
Las Cruces City Clerk Christine Rivera recommended that the city implement updates to key election procedures, including a transition to an electronic system for prospective candidates and a focus on ranked choice voting education.
Councilor Johana Bencomo says that transitioning to an electronic system will help to increase election transparency as the documents can be made easily available to the public online.
“I definitely think we're running some outdated elections in the city,” Bencomo said. “For being such an awesome city, I think it's a little outdated. So, I think those online platforms are really incredible, and honestly, I think they add definitely to the transparency of elections, which I believe should be fully transparent.”
The city is also working to provide education onranked choice voting, a system first implemented locally during the 2019 election cycle. A new campaign is already in development, working to provide information in both Spanish and English on various media platforms.
Rivera also asked the city council to think about future policy changes, such as reinstating the petition process previously required for city council and mayoral candidates.
“How the petition process previously worked was that you would need to have 25 signatures of registered voters in your district, if you were running for a district seat, or 150 signatures of anybody in the city, to run for mayor,” Rivera said. “So, we removed this. As you saw in the 2019 election, when we removed that, we did have more candidates who did run for office.”
Assistant City Attorney Robert Cabello says that the petition process was eliminated following the adoption of the New Mexico Local Election Act.
“When it was passed in March 2018, that actually obviously brought a lot of uniformity to local elections in the state,” Cabello said. “At that time, it did away with our nominated petitions…there were a second set of changes in 2019 to the Local Election Act that gave back local communities the petitioning process.”
The majority of city council members indicated they would support reinstating a signature policy, but both Councilor Bencomo and Councilor Tessa Abeyta-Stuve say the need for signatures isn’t necessary. Bencomo emphasized the election process should be as open as possible.
“Honestly for a really long-time elections have been very exclusive. They've been really reserved for historically, across the country, wealthier people,” Bencomo said. “And honestly, I don't necessarily think that a candidate being able to collect a certain amount of signatures says whether they're more committed or not. I think sometimes it could say you raised more money, and you hired more people to collect signatures for you.”
Mayor Ken Miyagishima was a fierce advocate for reinstating the petition process, saying it would benefit serious challengers looking to run for mayor.
“I mean it's good for the incumbent, but it doesn’t help the challengers any,” Miyagishima said. “They can't get their word in edgewise because there's so many that have to go through it and a fourth of them aren’t even serious candidates...so I think having signatures, I would support it.”
