Tittle’s letter to Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver for more detail on her second complaint and requested remedies, a side-bar to this article: Citizen investigation reveals problems with 382 out of 1,493 ballots in January 2019 Off-Road-Vehi

by Kathleen Sloan | January 17, 2020
4 min read
DIANA TITTLE
January 7, 2020

Maggie Toulouse Oliver
New Mexico Secretary of State
Office of the Secretary of State
325 Don Gaspar, Suite 300
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501

Dear Secretary Toulouse Oliver:
Last August, Sharon Pino, then the deputy secretary of state, denied my request for an investigation into the impact of security and verification irregularities that I witnessed as an official Election Day observer of a mail-in referendum conducted in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (TorC) on January 15, 2019.

The referendum sought but failed (by a vote of 781 to 712) to overturn TorC Ordinance 697, which permitted off-road vehicle access to all city streets. 

In order to ascertain whether the election results had been materially affected by the irregularities that I documented in my complaint, I requested that your office inspect the outside mailing envelopes returned with the 1,493 ballots that were counted as legitimate by the TorC City Clerk’s Office.

I have since conducted the denied review of the envelopes, accessed via an Inspection of Public Records Act request. I herewith file with you personally a second formal complaint to ensure that your office takes seriously the review’s disturbing findings. 

Fully one fourth of the envelopes that I examined over the course of the fall and early winter have disqualifying identification problems that were NOT caught by either the TorC City Clerk’s Office or the election judges. Included in this number are instances of possible felony voter violations of state election laws and possible voter fraud.

These findings, which are categorized and indexed in the enclosed Attachment A, call into question the legitimacy of TorC’s January 15, 2019, referendum results. 

They also raise the unsettling prospect that the integrity of mail-in elections throughout New Mexico is routinely compromised by the inadequacy of mail-in ballot verification requirements (even after HB 407’s “fine-tuning”) and the absence of official observance and/or strict enforcement of even the minimal verification protocols on the books.

I call upon you, Madam Secretary, to:

  1. quickly examine and corroborate my findings;
  2. take immediate and appropriate steps to supervise the administration of TorC’s upcoming city commissioner elections and still-to-be scheduled petition initiative special election to ensure their integrity;
  3. refer the possible illegalities I uncovered to the New Mexico Attorney General Office for criminal investigation.

 
It is my hope that you will use the TorC referendum as an object lesson arguing for tightening the state’s mail-in ballot identification requirements to include signature verification. Just as important, your office must implement measures to ensure the meticulous observance of stronger identification and verification protocols, especially by those municipalities that, like TorC, have “opted out” of the Local Election Act of 2018’s provisions for county management and state funding of special elections.

Let me remind you that your Ethics Division ignored the mandate to adjudicate my first complaint within 90 days of its filing on January 24, 2019. The TorC City Clerk’s formal response was submitted on March 7, 2019. Five months passed before the Ethics Division informed me that it had accepted at face value the clerk’s assertions that my numerous examples of her office’s failure to follow state election laws were ill-informed or insignificant. I was never interviewed or offered the required public fact-finding hearing. Two other security and ethical complaints about the January 15 referendum filed with the Ethics Division by fellow TorC resident Ron Fenn were also dilatorily dismissed without serious investigation.

Please don’t look the other way this time.

What’s at stake is nothing less than New Mexicans’ trust in the integrity of our elections. Without fair and secure elections, democracy withers and dies.

Sincerely yours,
Diana Tittle

Attachments (5)
     A:  Index to disqualifying problems
     B:  Referendum mailing envelopes, scanned and sorted into batches
     C:  Envelopes evidencing possibly illegal second-party assistance
     D:  First Tittle complaint to SOS (pertinent correspondence)
     E:  Second Tittle complaint to SOS.1.7.20

CC:  Via Certified Mail, with Enclosed Thumb Drive
Hector Balderas, New Mexico Attorney General

CC: Via Electronic Mail, including Attachments
John Blair, Deputy Secretary of State and Chief of Staff
Sharon Pino, General Counsel, New Mexico Office of the Secretary of State
Patricia Salazar, New Mexico Assistant Attorney General
Peter Valencia, New Mexico Assistant Attorney General

Page 3

CC: Via Electronic Mail, including Attachments (Con’t)
Melanie Majors, Executive Director, New Mexico Foundation for Open Government
Kathleen Sabo, Executive Director, Ethics Watch
Shelly Trujillo, Sierra County Clerk

Morris Madrid, City Manager, Truth or Consequences
Sandra Whitehead, Mayor, Truth or Consequences
Kathy Clark, Mayor Pro Tem, Truth or Consequences
Paul Baca, Rolf Hechler and George Szigeti, City Commissioners, Truth or Consequences
Renée Cantin, City Clerk, Truth or Consequences

Edmundo Carrillo, Staff Writer, Albuquerque Journal
Daniel Chaćon, Government Reporter, Santa Fe New Mexican
Mike Gallagher, Investigative Reporter, Albuquerque Journal
Michael Gerstein, Political Reporter, Santa Fe New Mexican
Michael McDevitt, Government Watchdog/Enterprise Reporter, Las Cruces Sun-News
Chris Ramirez, Investigative Reporter, KOB Channel 4
Kathleen Sloan, Investigative Reporter and Publisher, Sierra County Sun

author
Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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