New Mexicans voted

New Mexicans voted and proved that our dream of a freely elected nation shall never die.

Yesterday New Mexican's turned out in what I am sure will be record numbers to vote for the candidate of their choice. I was working from noon until 9:30 at one of the caucus sites here in Bernalillo County. We had 1,000 ballots to start the evening with but ran out around 5:00 pm. We received more ballots from the party headquarters after about 20 minutes of not having ballots. The crowd for the most part understood when it came to waiting on ballots. My caucus site processed over 1,600 ballots when the voting was over and done with for the evening. The site I was working at usually does not process over 1,000 ballots in a normal election year. I saw a great number of young people turn out to vote in this year's election. I am sure from the results that I saw on television this morning that they were voting for Senator Obama.

Yes, because I worked the site I will not tell anyone what I saw while I was counting the votes. I think that voting should be a private matter. I must admit to being amazed at camera crews from local news stations who tried very hard to come into the site uninvited and take film of the process. All of the local stations were told that voting was a private matter and they should contact State Party Chair Brian Colon if they wanted to film one of the caucus sites. It would have been a lot less amazing if it had only been one camera crew but when the second one showed up and tried to tell me it was ok for them to be there I knew at that point we were going to have to be more firm with them in order to protect the voter's privacy. I guest reporting a story is more important to them then voter's rights.

I personally think that all of the volunteers that worked the caucus sites should receive a big thank you for all of their hard work during the last few days. No one expected the turn out to be as large as it was and all of the volunteers went above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that everyone who showed up to a caucus site got to cast their vote for the candidate of their choice. None of the volunteers were paid for their service and some of them had to take time off from work just to be there in the first place.

I would love to see more young people volunteer with the voting process in the future because I think that with their youth that they could process the votes much quicker. I think it would also give them a chance to become more involved in the process of electing the leaders of their community and their nation. I can only hope that getting younger people out to vote this year will be the start of them coming out to vote in future years.