NM Secretary of State claims rigging an election is ‘next to impossible’
On Thursday, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver wrote on Twitter a strange statement defending her office’s work to ensure the integrity of election results. She claimed that it was “next to impossible” to “rig” an election and that there were multiple “safeguards” to endure elections were free and fair.
She wrote, “The layers of transparency, accountability & complexity involved in the election process make the act of “rigging” an election next to impossible. Every ballot in #NM is accounted for & every step of the process is layered w safeguards to ensure accuracy.”
The photograph included in the tweet claims that each election has a county canvass, a canvas by the Secretary of State’s office, an independent post-election audit, and a review by the State Canvassing Board, which Toulouse Oliver notes include Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Democrat Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Michale E. Vigil, and the Canvassing Board.
However, her office’s so-called “layers of transparency” don’t appear to add up, given that in 2018, there were thousands of irregularities in the Second Congressional District race when there was an independent audit done, which her state-run audit did not find.
According to the report conducted after the election, “These anomalies are not simply organic. Reviewing the historical returns in the CD2 district, over the last five election cycles, the same degrees of variation between absentee votes and EV/ED votes do not exist in CD2 in any cycle to the degree found in the 2018 race.”
Other major anomalies occurred, but the most malevolent of them is the 25% of absentee voters who requested ballots in Doña Ana County and never returned them — a number that rarely reaches 5%. According to the report:
“it is probably the strongest purely statistical red flag present in this whole election — of the possibility that someone was submitting absentee ballot applications for Democrats. There is also a significantly high number of duplicate applications — where one voter supposedly submitted more than one absentee ballot application or submitted an absentee application after the absentee ballot had been received, or the voter had voted in person. In many of these cases the signature on the duplicate applications do not match each other.”
No information on these eye-opening irregularities came out in 2018 from the Secretary of State’s office, the state Canvassing Board, or any other supposed group that reviewed the election results, which was only found in an independent candidate-funded audit.
However, earlier in the day, the Secretary of State claimed that “conspiracy theories” needed to be addressed, where she claimed Dominion Voting Systems do not glitch and that such assertions are“categorically false.” She also claimed any issues with Sharpie pens and voting are false.
“The statements being made about Dominion Voting Systems are categorically false. No votes were changed or ‘glitched.’ There’s no secret CIA program for vote fraud. There are no issues with Sharpie pens being used to mark ballots,” she said.
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