New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran said earlier this year that her state had a “culture of corruption” and referred 64,000 voter registration records to police that she thought were possible cases of voter fraud. Now a new report from her office proves she was completely right, 0.0296875 percent of the time.
Duran’s interim report now alleges that 104 voters — about one for every 10,577 on the rolls — were illegally registered to vote. Of that group, just 19 — or approximately one for every 57,894 registered voters — actually allegedly cast a ballot they shouldn’t have.
The report says the Secretary of State’s office “has no such role in the political process” and is “independent” from partisan debate, then goes on to preemptively criticize anyone who might take issue with the fact that, despite her rhetoric, she found such and extremely small amount of alleged incidents.
“We are confident that some will say that ‘it’s only a few thousand,’ or they will vigorously disparage the findings, and assert their strong ‘belief’ that the findings are unimportant,” the report states. “Again, we have no issue with those kinds of talking points, assertions, or attitudes. We expect them from political and partisan interests. We are simply not in that game. Our duty is to the people of New Mexico, their Constitution and their laws; not to parties, candidates, lobbies, special interest groups or political action committees.”
The report concludes: “To those who say that vote fraud (if it does exist) is ‘insignificant,’ our answer is that no instance of vote fraud, or ineligible registration, or ineligible voting, is now, or ever will be ‘insignificant’ to this office. Every single vote cast by an ineligible voter cancels and invalidates a vote cast by a legal voter, and leaves that law-abiding citizen completely disenfranchised. It may also alter the outcome of an election. That is the sober reality of the electoral system. We will continue in our mission. Our Constitutional duty is clear.”
Duran’s investigation, state Democratic Party Executive Director Scott Forrester said in a statement, “has turned up basically nothing, and she can’t even say for sure what she did or did not find — 19 people out of 1 million registered voters who may or may not have actually done anything wrong? Here we go again, Dianna Duran is making even more claims without any facts to back them up.”
Here’s a local news report on Duran’s report, a copy of which is embedded below:
