Nov. 26—In less than 15 minutes and with wishes for a happy Thanksgiving, New Mexico officials certified the 2024 general election results and ordered automatic recounts for two races.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver and state Supreme Court Chief Justice David Thomson met Tuesday morning at the state Capitol to certify the 2024 general election results. The State Canvassing Board meeting was only available to the public via webcast.
“Before we begin, I want to reiterate that the 2024 general election was run with efficiency and integrity by the state’s election administrators,” Toulouse Oliver said, “and every New Mexican should have the highest level of confidence in these official election results.”
Three levels of checks happened before the election results came before the State Canvassing Board.
Canvassing — the process of examining votes officially for authenticity — first happened at the county level and then the state level. Then, an independent contractor audited the results and forwarded them to the Canvassing Board.
Additionally, in every statewide election, the state conducts a “risk-limiting audit,” meaning the results of a few randomly selected races and precincts are hand-counted and compared to the normal machine-counted results.
The Canvassing Board on Monday also ordered two automatic vote recounts. The state is required to order an automatic recount for districts that aren’t statewide or federal that had election results within a 1% margin between the top two vote recipients. That’s two races in the 2024 general election, Toulouse Oliver said.
The race for House District 57 between Republican Catherine Cullen and Democrat Michelle Sandoval resulted in Cullen leading by 130 votes, or 0.78%.
And the Los Alamos County race for county commissioner at large saw Republican David Reagor leading Democrat Denise Derkacs by 195 votes, or 0.74%.
The state will start the recounts on Dec. 3 and continue until they wrap up, likely within three days.
The Canvassing Board will meet again on Dec. 16 to certify those results. Lujan Grisham won’t be available for the meeting, but Toulouse Oliver and Thomson will still have a quorum.
By the numbers: Voter turnout
New Mexico had 1.38 million eligible voters and a turnout of 928,290 voters, or about a 67% turnout, Toulouse Oliver said. That’s about 1% fewer voters than the last presidential election.
She added that early voting comprised nearly 60% of the turnout, Election Day voting made up about 30% and 12% came from absentee voting.
More than 52,000 people used same-day voter registration, and half of those were on Election Day alone, Toulouse Oliver said. She described it as an exponential increase in usage compared with the last election, in response to a question from the governor about it.
“And that might then lend itself to another point about the confidence and the access,” Lujan Grisham said. “Elections matter more when more people are using their constitutional right in the polls.”
The state also had almost 8,100 provisional ballots and handhelds, Toulouse Oliver said.
Lujan Grisham thanked all the local, state and federal officials, helpers and volunteers for ensuring that New Mexico has “one of the best election processes in the country.”
