Strong voter turnout in county

Valencia County voters turned out in numbers on par with the last presidential election, with 69.46 percent of eligible voters casting a ballot, surpassing the statewide turnout of 66.16 percent.

Combining early, absentee and day of ballots, there were 33,272 ballots cast by 47,897 eligible voters in the 2024 General Election.

Most of those ballots were cast during early voting, with 20,017 ballots submitted at the county’s four early voting sites, according to Valencia County Chief Deputy Clerk Brenda Green.

In 2020, 69.58 percent of the 46,109 eligible voters turned out for the General Election, slightly better than the 67.51 percent turnout statewide.

“All of our sites were busy (on Tuesday),” said Green. “The main problem we had was with same-day registration because we had such a huge volume of registrants at all sites. The system we use to process SDRs from the Secretary of State was running very slow, and late in the day, it pretty much became nonfunctional.”

Green said by the end of Election Day, all but one of the county’s 15 voting convenience centers still had voters waiting in line, most of who were needing to register or finalize their registration.

“We got to a point where we couldn’t process anything so we reverted to provisional ballots,” she said Wednesday morning. “We finished up with everyone at about a quarter til 8. The board is meeting (Wednesday) to hand tally all the provisional ballots,” she said. “I don’t have a number (of provisional ballots) yet.”

On election day, not including the provisionals, 8,833 ballots, were processed, with the center at the Los Lunas Schools Administration building being the “big winner,” Green said, processing more than 1,100 voters.

“That’s a lot of voters for one site on one day,” she said.

There have been 4,422 absentee ballots received back and processed at this point, with 215 not returned, the chief deputy clerk said. There are 65 absentee ballots awaiting cures, and voters have until 5 p.m., Friday, Nov. 8, to correct either the signature or last four digits of the Social Security number required.

“We had a great turnout for absentees. They were coming back very quickly. By the week after they were sent out, we were processing several hundred per day. People were not dilly dallying around,” she said. “I do want to remind people, absentee ballots had to be physically in our hands or at a polling place by 7 p.m. on Tuesday.”

Green advised the public numbers on the New Mexico Secretary of State’s website will continue to change during this week. There are more than 200 overseas military and out-of-country ballots that need to be input, plus the hand tallies for the provisional ballots cast on Tuesday and any cured absentee ballots.

“We have an amazing staff in this office that did a bang-up job in the weeks leading up to the election. This is my third presidential election and this was of monumental proportions, yet the staff, presiding judges, poll workers, all did an amazing job enabling every member of the public the ability to vote,” Green said. “We had so many instances of first-time registrants, seniors and people who had not voted for many, many years, who made the effort. I was amazed at how many first time voters came out for this election. People understood this was important and made their voices heard.”

The canvass of the results by the Valencia County Commission is scheduled for Nov. 13 and the state canvass will be held on Nov. 26. Once both canvasses are complete, the results are final.