Seven days left in the 2018 New Mexico Legislative session
Seven days left in the 2018 New Mexico Legislative session
HJM 10 “Pass Fix It America” passed the House floor 41-28!
After waiting on the House calendar for several days, HJM 10 was finally heard!
Last night, New Mexico took another step towards leading the nation in a groundbreaking effort to end the vast amounts of undisclosed money that is currently spent in our elections, and to stop partisan gerrymandering that intentionally favors political parties. This Joint Memorial is now headed over to the Senate.
With only a week left in the session, things are moving quickly. Please call or email your legislators and ask them to support HJM 10 TODAY!
Here is the full text of what this Joint Memorial will ask Congress to do:
Section I. Congress and the states shall have the power to regulate the role of money in elections and governance to ensure transparency, prevent corruption, and protect against the buying of access to or influence over representatives. No such reasonable regulation shall be deemed in violation of freedom of speech rights in the Constitution of the United States or its Amendments.
Section II. Legislative districts or districting plans shall not intentionally or unduly favor or disfavor any political party.
Other Priorities for Common Cause New Mexico
And with only seven days left, our other two priorities are essentially dead for the year. Neither has had a committee hearing at this point.
- A Constitutional Amendment for a State Redistricting Commission, HJR 4, sponsored by Reps. Carl Trujillo & Sarah Maestas Barnes, and in the Senate by Sens. Mark Moores & Daniel Ivey-Soto, will establish a redistricting commission that will use a fair, transparent process to evaluate new census data every 10 years and draw new district boundaries. Currently, the redistricting process is not transparent, and all too often, there is no public participation. The public’s perception of this process is that districts are drawn to serve the political interests of those who draw them, rather than the interests of citizens.
- Registration of All Qualified Voters, Senate Joint Resolution 5, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto, requires the state to “ensure that all qualified electors are registered to vote for each election, except for those who affirmatively choose not to be registered, and that the vote of a qualified elector shall not be excluded from being counted for failure of the state to provide for the qualified elector’s voter registration on or before election day.
As always, thanks for checking in and lending your voice to help us build a better democracy!