Early voting mobile van heading
to Zuni

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — McKinley County commissioners approved sending the county’s mobile voter registration van down to the Zuni Pueblo before the election for early voting but they’re not happy about it.

“I still have a lot of questions about this,” said Committee member Billy Moore and the commission’s chairman indicated he had a lot of questions too. The third member of the commission, Ernest Becenti, wasn’t there on Tuesday.

County election officials have been talking for months about sending the van around the county to make it easier for rural area voters to get to the polls. Just before the primary, Rick Palochak, the county’s election chief, submitted a proposal for the van to hit seven county sites before the primary.

The commission, however, rejected this proposal, saying that there were just too many questions about the idea.

These same questions surfaced on Tuesday when Palochak presented his newest version, which reduced the seven locations to just two, Zuni and Crownpoint, with the van staying at both locations for a week.

Moore, however, said he still had concerns about how secure the ballots would be if they were left overnight in the van. There were also concerns that people would vote in the van and then try to vote again on election day and county elections officials would not be able to track that.

Palochak said he didn’t think that the double voting would be an issue and offered to have the ballots picked up each day and brought back to the county offices here in Gallup for safekeeping.

But the commission hemmed and hawed and appeared not to be very receptive to the idea at all because of fears that it would result in the county being sued if there was a close election and someone claimed that the county tried to determine the outcome by putting the van in an area that favored one candidate over another.

County Attorney Doug Decker said state law requires the county to provide two places in the county for early voting, which it does — in Gallup and Thoreau. But he also pointed out that in 2007, the state Legislature approved another law which requires counties to provide another early voting site on an Indian reservation or a pueblo if the Native group’s governing body requests it.

The Navajos have not requested an extra site but the Zuni have, so Decker said the commission has no choice but to approve a site down in Zuni.

He also said that the state has not provided any guidelines on how long the site has to be opened or where it should be located so McKinley County is having to come up with its own guidelines. The decision was to take the van and put it in front of the Zuni government building for a week from Oct. 28-Nov. 1 so that pueblo members could vote early without having to travel to Gallup.

The state did not set any deadlines when an Indian tribe has to make the request for a voting site so the commission said they would play that one by ear and wait to see if a chapter or the tribal government makes a request. The county would be able to eject the request if any part of that group’s area is within 15 miles of an early voting site.

But county officials said that realistically, the county would have to set a deadline because it would have to approve the cost of sending the van so unofficially, that deadline will be over after the next commission meeting on the first Tuesday in October.