Elizabeth Swenson, 20, was looking over a sample ballot as she came up on three hours in line at the Corbett Center Student Union on the New Mexico State University campus in Las Cruces. (Photo by Leah Romero / Source New Mexico)
LAS CRUCES – Nearly 220,000 New Mexico voters had already cast their ballot in-person Tuesday, a significant jump in the number of people who voted on Election Day four years ago.
According to the latest figures from the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office, 219,178 New Mexicans voted before 5 p.m. Tuesday. Polls were open for two more hours after that update, but that was already 35% higher than the 142,887 people who voted on Election Day in 2020.
Final numbers of voters are expected to be released later Tuesday. Polls closed at 7 p.m.
High turnout coincided with long lines in some places, including on the campus of New Mexico State University.
Also, a glut of voters seeking to register and vote today caused at least brief delays in the Secretary of State’s approval system, according to a spokesperson and voters who were forced to wait to get their registrations approved.
In 2020, a total of 928,172 voters turned out here, which was about 69% of registered voters in the state at the time.
As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, a total of 889,454 voters had cast ballots in a variety of ways, which is about 64.6% of all registered voters.
About 70 people sat on chairs and couches as they waited in line to register to vote Tuesday evening at Corbett Center Student Union at NMSU. Some people at the front of the line said they’d been waiting for over three hours. A separate line of already registered voters moved much quicker.
Elizabeth Swenson, 20, was one of those who faced a long wait time. She told Source New Mexico that she initially tried to register, only to learn from a poll worker that she had to get proof she lived in a dorm from the campus housing department.
Swenson said she would have tried to register earlier if she knew the wait was going to be so long. But even the delays didn’t curb her enthusiasm – it was her first time to cast a vote.
“There’s a lot more on here than I thought,” Swenson said as she scanned the sample ballot.
Kathe Kanim, presiding judge at the Corbett Center polling place, said the high volume of same-day registrants caused the long wait. She said it was taking up to an hour for applications to process before those who registered could vote.
Around 8 a.m. on Tuesday, some county clerks across the state, including those in Bernalillo, Sandoval, Doña Ana and Santa Fe counties, began reporting to the state delays in the approvals for same-day registrations, according to Alex Curtas, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office.
Curtas said the office quickly added more servers to process the registration requests, and he said the issue was resolved by around 9 a.m.
Curtas could not say immediately how many voters might have been affected by the delay.
“We did some things on the back end to ensure that that wouldn’t happen again, basically deployed some more servers to make sure there wasn’t any backlog happening,” he said. “And we think that that pretty much solved the problem.”
Curtas attributed the delay to a “robust” demand for same-day voter registration today.
During local elections in 2023, about 4,900 voters used same-day voter registration, which the Legislature approved in 2019. That was about 2% of all the voters who cast ballots that election.
Compare that to today, when there were more than 45,000 same-day voters as of 5 p.m.
Curtas stressed that voters can always file provisional ballots if they encounter an issue like a delay in same day voter registration processing. Those votes will be counted, even if there was a technical issue at the polling place, he said, as long as the voter is otherwise qualified to cast a ballot.
Robin Baldwin, 33, encountered the delay Tuesday morning in Las Cruces. She moved here in the last few weeks from Asheville, North Carolina. She said she was already planning to move, but the devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene was a sign to move sooner.
Baldwin, who is a case manager at a law firm, said the registration process was easy, and she didn’t mind the wait.
Caroline Zamora, deputy county clerk for Doña Ana County, told Source New Mexico that same-day registration tends to be slower on Election Day, anyway, because polling places statewide are using the same system to communicate with the Secretary of State’s Office.
It was at least a 30-minute delay, she said.
Otherwise, there were no issues in the county today, she said.
“It’s been a boring day,” she said, “which I am happy about.”