By Danielle Prokop, Source NM
The lead elections official in Torrance County is apologizing and assuring voters that their ballots will be counted after workers mistakenly mailed about 140 absentee ballots without return address labels.
Republican Torrance County Clerk Linda Jaramillo said the clerks’ office had received more than 100 of those now-completed ballots back as of Friday.
“This was an isolated incident,” said Jaramillo in an interview with Source NM. “It has never happened to my board before, and I apologize.”
Elections workers on the county’s absentee board failed to add the return labels to a batch of ballots that they were sending out in early October, Jaramillo said. The 140 affected voters only for about 1% of the county’s more than 10,000 voters.
Usually, New Mexico absentee ballots have a “pre-paid official return envelope” with the address of the local county clerk’s office.
The missing labels do not have any impact on the ballot’s validity, Jaramillo said, and there will be no issue counting them for Election Day totals.
A voter called to report a missing label in the middle of the outer envelope after the county mailed absentee ballots on Oct. 8, Jaramillo said. She said she then alerted the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office and spoke with post offices in the county.
She said some people wrote the return address back and sent them through the mail, while others placed them in drop boxes or hand delivered them to election sites – all acceptable means of returning an absentee ballot.
“Slowly, we’re eliminating any of them being out there,” Jaramillo said.
Post offices either returned ballots to voters, she said, but also sent a batch to the Torrance County Clerk’s office without the return address.
As of Monday, 557 Torrance County voters returned their absentee ballots, according to the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office. In total, 876 voters requested an absentee ballot in Torrance County.
Last week, New Mexico county clerks urged voters to drop off their absentee ballots at election sites or drop boxes to ensure they will be delivered on time, rather than relying on the mail this close to Election Day.
Elections officials around the country are fighting a flood of election conspiracy theories and disinformation pushed by former president Donald Trump and others, while also trying to balance legitimate concerns about delivery delays with the Postal Service.
Jaramillo said she wanted to reassure voters that their votes would be counted and that the event was limited in size and that the ballots have enough time to be returned before Election Day on Nov. 5.
“But something like this happens, and it does cast doubt in people’s minds. And I understand that,” she said. “But I’ve run elections for 25 years and nothing like this has ever happened before.”
Jaramillo was first elected as Torrance County clerk in 1997, and retired from the position in 2020. The county commission appointed her to the job again in 2023 after voting to oust her successor after she stopped showing up for work.
Jaramillo is running unopposed for a Torrance County Commission seat. The current deputy clerk, Sylvia Chavez, is running unopposed as a Republican for Torrance County clerk.
Alex Curtas, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Secretary of State, said in an email Monday there were no other issues with absentee ballots in other counties.
“Our staff at the Secretary of State’s Office have been working closely with the county clerk and the USPS to make sure any ballots that were sent without a pre-printed return address are either addressed by the voter themselves or are delivered to Torrance County even if the return address is blank,” Curtas wrote.
Matilda Graves, the postmaster at Mountainair, declined to comment when reached by Source NM, deferring comment to an official spokesman for the U. S. Postal Service.
John Hyatt, a spokesman for the postal Service, declined an interview request on Monday, but said in a written statement that area post offices are aware of the issue.
“Postal employees in the area are working to collect all the unaddressed returning ballots and provide them to the county’s election office,” Hyatt said.
Two other postmasters in Torrance County could not be reached for comment about the situation Friday.