New Mexico Poised to Bypass Democracy in Favor of Democrat Political Insiders Again

After getting away with installing Kamal Harris as a presidential candidate with no input from voters and leaving Robert Kennedy Jr. on the presidential ballot after he had withdrawn from the race in the last election, New Mexico Democrats are carrying out yet another stunning affront to democracy to ensure they maintain control of New Mexico House District 6.

The story starts with the 2024 race for New Mexico House District 6, which contains parts of Cibola and McKinley Counties. The race was between Democrat incumbent Eliseo Alcon and Republican Paul Spencer. Spencer won Cibola County with 54 percent of the vote but lost the overall race to Alcon with a 59/41 split.

On November 25th, it was widely reported in the media that Alcon was resigning effective immediately from his seat, less than three weeks after being reelected. One article stated that Alcon was “placed on hospice care…because his treatment for liver cancer isn’t working.”

If Alcon is in hospice care, then he must have known he had cancer well before the November 5th election. He evidently kept the fact that he was in the advanced stages of the disease from the public and from his constituency until the election was over.

In electoral politics, incumbents typically have a guaranteed advantage over their opponent, while open seats are the easiest to flip from one party to the other, which explains why Alcon would stay through his election before immediately resigning. But for the residents of House District 6, these maneuvers have the effect of leaving them out of the democratic process of choosing their representative.

When a seat becomes vacant during an elected representative’s term, the county commissions of the affected counties will nominate candidates to send to the Governor’s office, who then makes the final appointment.

The Cibola County Commission held their meeting on December 3rd to discuss and nominate Alcon’s replacement. Cibola Commissioner Robert Scott Windhorst made a lengthy post on social media about his impressions of that meeting. There were at least five candidates who had submitted resumes to the commissioners. Explaining that he preferred the nominee to have been vetted by the people through a campaign, Windhorst nominated Paul Spencer for the position – a man who won the majority of the votes in Cibola County and garnered 41 percent of the entire district. None of the other four commissioners seconded Windhorst’s nomination, so it died on the floor.

Next, Cibola County Commissioner Martha Garcia nominated Representative Harry Garcia, who currently represents neighboring District 69 until the end of the year. Garcia lost the June 2024 primary to Michelle Abeyta, a graduate of a far-left organization called Emerge which seeks to displace men from elected positions. Garcia quickly received a unanimous vote from the commission to be their nominee to replace Alcon as District 6 representative.

New Mexico law requires that representatives be residents of the district that they represent. As he is currently representing District 69, Garcia is ineligible to be a representative of District 6 as these districts do not overlap. But with great prescience on what would unfold between his loss in the June primary election and Alcon’s resignation, Garcia changed his voter registration address on November 25th so that he would have an address within District 6 and be eligible for the appointment. According to Commission Windhorst, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver informed the commission that there were two candidates for the District 6 position who had changed their voter registration addresses at the eleventh hour leading up to Alcon’s resignation. According to Oliver, all of this was perfectly legal.

According to an article in the Albuquerque Journal, Garcia discussed his plan to switch districts so he could receive the appointment with the Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver ahead of time. But they missed a glaring problem with this scheme – the law explicitly states,

“If any senator or representative permanently removes his residence from or maintains no residence in the district from which he was elected, then he shall be deemed to have resigned.”

When Garcia claimed to move his residence by changing his voter registration, he effectively resigned his seat in the legislature. However, the House Finance committee on which Garcia sits, has been conducting official business in December, and Garcia has been participating. He can’t be eligible for the District 6 appointment while simultaneously actively representing District 69.

New Mexico campaign finance law also requires sitting legislatures to maintain up-to-date campaign committee documentation – Garcia has failed to update his address for his campaign to match the address he is using to proffer himself as an appointee for District 6.

Garcia’s hubris is further demonstrated in the Journal article:

“I’ve always had residences in both districts,” Garcia told the Journal.

He also said he knew there would be concerns about his bid to replace Alcon but said he already knows many of the residents and communities in the district.

“I thought it would be very beneficial for the communities, and that’s why I did it,” Garcia said.

Garcia seems to forget that his own feelings about how good he would be for the residents and communities of District 6 are irrelevant in a democratic republic – at least they should be. He must be elected by the people, not installed by illegal processes and corrupt inside dealing.

There is another problem with this corrupt shuffling of legislative power: Alcon resigned before he had legally been declared the winner of District 6’s House seat.

New Mexico state law says,

“The state canvassing board shall meet in the state capitol on the third Tuesday after each statewide election and proceed to approve the report of the canvass and declare the results of the election…”

The meeting where the results of the state’s elections were officially declared didn’t take place until November 26th – the day after Alcon resigned his seat. We are unsure of what should happen in this legal vacuum when a candidate resigns before he is even declared the winner, but this is indicative of the ruling class in New Mexico playing fast and loose with the law when they are busy securing their own interests without input from the people.

No appointment can be made by the Governor until McKinley County sends their recommendation to her office. McKinley County has surprisingly delayed voting on their nomination for the seat twice. Perhaps they hesitate to take part in this process which certainly has the appearance of unethical insider knowledge being wielded by Eliseo Alcon, Harry Garcia, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, and the Cibola County Commissioners against the voters of House District 6.

There is still time for the public to let the McKinley County Commissioners know who they would want to represent them and demand a real democratic process be carried out to determine who will be the House Representative for District 6.