TIME WAS, NO ONE BUT DEEP POLITICS NERDS knew who their Secretary of State was. Somewhere along the misinformation superhighway, that changed. Now, the people who run our elections are the battered sandbags keeping out a storm of lies eroding our democracy.
Election officials have a reputation for being mild-mannered public servants who consider it a job well done when no one knows who they are. But Maggie Toulouse Oliver is no one’s idea of milquetoast. The outspoken New Mexico Secretary of State isn’t afraid to say no to powerful politicians, force election deniers to face the music, and call out those who would exploit public ignorance to sow seeds of doubt.
You’ve got to be tough to protect voters these days.
You were elected Secretary of State the day that Donald Trump was elected President. Not long ago, few people could name their election officials. Now, you are the target of misinformation and vitriol. What’s it been like?
It’s been surreal. When I started running elections, the entire goal was to stay out of the newspaper. If there’s nothing mentioned about the election in the news, then you’re doing the finest job you can possibly do.
Look, elections are never perfect. There’s just so much human factor involved. The biggest challenge is the fact that you’re never going to have a perfect process, a perfect system, a perfect election, yet for some reason perfection is expected. The focus of our process is resiliency and being able to address problems rather than avoid them.
I don’t know what I could have done to get attention on the election process before Donald Trump’s megaphone accused us of all sorts of grand conspiracies. I would say the silver lining of all of this has been that people are interested in the election process now, even though many of them are coming at it from a very skeptical point of view. It gives us an opportunity to demystify and educate people about what really does go into making the sausage. But the flip side is that, I used to deal with a handful of grumpy gusses. Now every armchair Facebook or Truth Social subscriber thinks they’re an election expert. There’s an incredible amount of vitriol. Being in the public eye, you’re going to get that no matter what, but I should not be somebody that people even really know or know what I do.
It’s a very unsexy job.
Yet you have faced death threats.
I have faced death threats. I’ve been doxed. The Iranian government doxed me and about 70 of my colleagues. They put us on a website called Enemies of the People. And my house, a picture of my house, my address, my phone number, my email.
I had to go elsewhere for several weeks.
How do the threats manifest themselves?
People post a lot to social media – Hang her in the town square type stuff, which by the way, the FBI determined that hanging fill in the blank here in the town square is not an actual viable threat. It doesn’t rise to the level of being investigated, because it is so pervasive. So many people say it about so many election officials that it’s crazy. Phone calls, texts, emails, I mean, you name it, we get all the threats that way.
I’ve been very safety conscious for many years. I was the victim of a violent crime in my 20s, and so I know how to protect myself personally and have done so for many years. We’ve ratcheted up the level of safety at home and so I feel safe. But, I feel like I’m being harassed and threatened to leave my job or to just make me miserable. They have a lot of ways of doing that – a thousand of them will send us the same request for documents just to make my staff’s life miserable. They spend their day producing documents rather than the work that they need to do to get ready for the next election.
What are you hearing from your colleagues? How crazy is it out there?
We’ve been hearing stories for a long time now, and I’ve had colleagues leave, particularly a very good Republican colleague in Louisiana ended up leaving. It just got to where what we call the election denial community were just so difficult to deal with. Even as a very conservative Republican, this gentleman was up against people saying the sky is red. Well, no, he’d say, I’m looking at it right now. The sky is blue. No, the sky is red. That’s what he was up against. He just couldn’t take it anymore and left.
I think certainly the Democrats and a good portion of the Republicans who understand the reality of election administration are very dedicated and have integrity. We understand the reality of the situation. My colleague from Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, gets a lot of threats. The women in his life have been harassed and threatened.
Then there’s this invisible wall, and I’ve got these other colleagues on the right who are in just complete denial that any of this is happening.
How do you reason with people who deny objective facts?
You can’t. This is what I’ve come to realize. It’s a cult mindset. They have been brainwashed. A Republican colleague of mine, he told me, I have a relative in my family who, we’ve talked about it, talked about it, talked about it. They know me, they trust me. They think I have integrity. And I ask this relative, is there anything I could show you? Anything that I could give to you, demonstrate to you, whatever, that would change your mind?
And this relative said no.
You have these individuals who are utterly convinced in the face of all evidence to the contrary that elections are being rigged, and there’s this grand conspiracy. And then, you’ve got people on the other side who trust the process, they know it’s not perfect, but they trust the process. Then you’ve got these people in the middle that might have questions. They may have seen something, they may be curious, they may have heard rumors about Dominion voting machines or the 2000 Mules movie or whatever. Those are the people that we are aiming for.
I would guess that’s probably 20% of voters. You’ve got half, a third over here, a third over here, and a small 20%. Those are the people we don’t want to lose. We want to retain their trust in our institutions and in our government and in our election process. I’m going to spend all day, every day, giving them the information they need to feel confident.
We now have election deniers winning offices where they oversee elections. You had to sue the commissioners in Otero County because they refused to count the votes.
It was the primary election two years ago. At the county level, counties certify their election results. And it’s what we call a ministerial duty. You can ask some questions, you can get some clarification. If there are errors, you can correct those. But you’ve got to certify the election. And these fools said, oh, we don’t trust it. I think it was former Commissioner Couy Griffin who said it’s a gut feeling. It’s a gut feeling that these machines don’t work and I can’t trust them. Well, I have a gut feeling that I’m going to win the lottery tomorrow. That’s my gut feeling.
We had to file a petition for what’s called a writ of mandamus. You’re forcing a government entity to do its job. The Supreme Court agreed with us. What would’ve happened if they hadn’t, is that 32 other counties in New Mexico would’ve been certified, but not Otero.
One of these very commissioners was running for re-election. Oh well, he doesn’t make it onto the general election ballot. He just totally self-selected himself off. There was a State Representative’s office entirely within Otero County. That State Representative is a huge blogger, was at January 6th, is an election denier. He would’ve been left off the general election ballot and not elected. There’s this cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face thing that I’ve never understood.
There are so many checks and balances built into our election process that it’s ridiculous. I couldn’t rig an election even if I wanted to, because it’s just not possible for one person in our election process, even the chief election official of the state, to rig an election.
What are those checks and balances?
No process that has anything to do with the counting of votes or ballots being cast is ever conducted by just one person or by one person of one party. There’s always members of the opposite political party present every single step of the vote casting.
We do what’s called a logic and accuracy test of every single voting tabulator that’s used before the election. What that means is we have a predetermined test deck of ballots. We know what the predicted outcome is supposed to be when we feed them through the tabulator. We make sure everything adds up the way it’s supposed to. If it doesn’t, we don’t use that machine.
We audit the machine before the election and we audit them after the election. We also do random post-election audits and automatic recounts in very close races so that we know the votes were counted accurately. We will do a random sample. We don’t know which precincts or machines are getting picked beforehand, they’re picked and we go through and we hand count those votes and compare them to those machine results after the fact.
I could go on, ad nauseam. The memory cards and the machines are never out of the custody of the bipartisan poll officials. The voting machines are never connected to the internet; they’re air-gapped. The results are uploaded to an air-gapped system before they’re published to our public website so that we have that sort of virgin record of election results before it ever touches the internet.
A lot of these activists demand that we do paper ballots and hand counts. What are the problems with doing it that way?
First of all, hand counting takes forever. Our ballots have 30, 40 questions on them. It’s going to take weeks and then we get the following problem, which is then people are complaining that it’s taking so long so something must be wrong. Right? You can’t have it both ways.
Number two, machines are proven to be more accurate than humans. It’s a literal fact. I’ve been through enough post-election processes, and we always do end up hand-handling some ballots because the machine couldn’t read it for some reason. There’s a stray mark. We have voters from overseas that are emailing their ballots back, because that’s the only way they can, they’re in a submarine somewhere. We know that we have to go over those multiple times to make sure they were counted correctly. Whereas with a machine, test it on the front end, get the results, audit it on the back end.
Donald Trump has promised to deport 15 to 20 million people. There’s about 60,000 undocumented immigrants living in New Mexico. Many of them are in mixed status immigration families. Stephen Miller, who’s Trump’s advisor on immigration, has said he wants police and National Guard going door to door. He wants camps set up along the border.
Boy, that has a ring to it, doesn’t it?
I personally think that though the President may favor…
God, I just feel like I Freudian-slipped there.
Though a potential future President Trump may want to implement this type of policy, there’s going to be a lot of resistance from within the federal government, a significant amount of resistance. Secondly, there will be a significant amount of resistance at the state level.
I do not see this being a fait accompli. I do not see this happening quickly or efficiently. The reality will be that communities like Santa Fe and Albuquerque and Las Cruces are going to rally to their sanctuary city cause and do everything that they can, in addition to utilizing state resources to protect these individuals. I see this as being some sabre-rattling that probably will not easily come to fruition in our state.
The National Guard doesn’t just fall under the authority of the federal government, it falls under the authority of state government as well. There could be some conflicting directives. We have state law and local law enforcement resources that we can utilize to resist and push back on any sort of potential activities. We can also take legal action within the state to further protect members of these communities. I’m not a genius in terms of immigration reform and policy, but there are certainly multiple remedies that could be applied both from a legislative and a law enforcement perspective.
Some of our neighbor states are passing very draconian laws against the rights of women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants. We have folks fleeing abortion and trans kids being refused medical care. Is New Mexico turning into a refuge for Americans who aren’t comfortable with the kind of governance they’re living under?
New Mexico has historically been what we would call purple, not necessarily blue, not necessarily red. There is that moderate to conservative Northern New Mexican Catholic Democratic influence. But what we really have seen over the last decade is a huge shift to the left politically, I think in many ways in response to what we’re seeing in Arizona, Texas, Utah. Colorado was in the same boat politically and they’ve made the same shift.
The Supreme Court is extremely conservative right now and we have an extremely conservative Congress. We’re that pillar or that oasis of safety for folks. It’s funny because 10, 15 years ago, we were struggling to move in this direction. We were struggling to get certain bills passed. I had to get sued as Secretary of State for people of the same gender to have the right to get married here. We always joke about it, every Pride, that I was the defendant – Griego v. Oliver is the case in New Mexico that legalized gay marriage. There was a quote in the paper, something to the effect of, I’ve never seen a defendant so happy to lose a case.
Look how things have changed so drastically in 10 years. Now, we are a sanctuary and an oasis for folks. I think that means we’re attracting people from our neighboring states that don’t feel safe in their communities anymore.
Is there a concerted organized movement in this country to dismantle our democracy?
There is.
They are organizing with each other to intervene and get involved in ministerial process or administration of the election process. Any time there’s a public hearing on anything — if a rule’s being written, if a bill’s being passed, if there’s a public hearing to establish polling places — whatever it is, they’re mobilizing. Now, they’re more vocal in some places than others. Here in New Mexico, we’re seeing it in Sandoval County, Otero County, to a pretty significant degree in Dona Ana County. We’re not seeing it here in Santa Fe. We’re not seeing it in Albuquerque, but they are mobilized.
They’re trying to gum up the works, because then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you gum up the works enough, maybe you do have a problem with the election.
I think the bigger problem is the circular logic of their thinking, that they’re trying to prove a negative. They’re searching for something that’s not there, that doesn’t exist. There’s no document you can show them, there’s no proof you can give them. They’re never going to get to what they’re looking for because it doesn’t exist.
They care more about one person holding power than they do about the Constitution, the other institutions of our democracy, the election process. That should be deeply concerning to every citizen who loves democracy.
I try not to exaggerate the problem. Normally, I would tell you that in an upcoming election, your vote for Congress or legislature or county commission is much more important than your vote for President. The closer the representative is to you and I, the more impact they have on our lives. But I do think this is the most critical presidential election of our lifetime.
And let me be clear, if Donald Trump wins the election, he’s going win it straight up. The voters will put him back in there.
The risk to our democracy is a four out of five right now. Our institutions are going to have to tolerate a massive onslaught against them if Donald Trump is reelected. Our institutions have been around for 248 years, and they can ultimately withstand it. But they are going to have to take a beating and it’s going be chaotic and stressful. A lot more people are going to feel unsafe going through that, and that is not a way to live. That’s not how we want people to have to live in this country.
We’ve seen a wave of women running for office, seemingly in response to these changes we’ve been talking about.
My longtime partner went to vote, and he lives in a Senate district where there was a highly contested race between a man and a woman. We talked about it, and he wanted to know how he should vote. I said, well, they’re both really great candidates, I can’t tell you, flip a coin.
He voted for the woman, because ‘all things being equal, I’m going vote for the woman.’ That’s him.
I think women are, well quite frankly, we just deal with a lot of shit. Sorry, stuff.
Feel free to curse.
Women have become accustomed to multitasking, to making hard decisions, to using the logical side of the brain, to putting emotion aside to get through a challenging situation. We’re trained at that from birth, living in a society where, in the last several hundred years, we’ve been subservient. People are starting to realize that women are highly capable of governing.
Men are great too, you know.
We could always elect drag queens.
There you go.
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