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Busy Season for the Attorney General

This should be a busy election season for Attorney General Gary King. He has already had to push the Secretary of State to act on Eli Lee’s creatively questionable use of not for profits, and now it remains to be seen whether he will begin investigations in the other efforts going on in New Mexico to undermine our elections.

I have long held that we don’t need to create ethics laws. We just need to enforce the laws on the books, and I believe it is up to the Attorney General to put partisanship aside (justice is neither Republican nor Democrat) and fully prosecute those who break the law.

Dave Maass of the Santa Fe Reporter has a recent article about PRC candidate Jerome Block Jr. writing check after check to a county clerk:

The money in the fund comes from inspection fees placed on utilities and a tax on insurance premiums. In other words, publicly-financed candidates receive their money from the state government.

In Block’s case, some of it ended up in the San Miguel County Clerk’s Office.

According to Block’s campaign records, a few days after the June 3 primary election, Block cut a $300 check to San Miguel County Clerk “Pecos” Paul Maez for “campaign coordination.”

San Miguel is the only county Block won in the six-way Democratic primary. Block used Maez’ official clerk’s office address on the report.

That same day, Block also cut a $2,500 check to the country-western band Wyld Country, in which Maez is a guitarist. According to Block’s campaign, the payment was for a rally in San Miguel County just prior to the primary election. Block deferred questions to his recently appointed campaign manager Jonathan Valdez.

Block used nearly 10% of his taxpayer funded (not government funded Mr. Maass) campaign funds to write checks to the county clerk in the only county he actually won in a primary. If this doesn’t scream for an investigation by the Attorney General, then I don’t know what does.

Oh wait. I do know something else that is just as atrocious…

Election season after election season the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) gets a pass as it strives to undermine the election system by paying people to turn in fraudulent voter registrations or intimidate voters. And, Scott Sandlin’s recent article shows that this year is no different:

Clovis native Rebecca Sitterly registered to vote soon after returning to her native state in 1979 and jumped right into Democratic politics about the same time.

So the former Bernalillo County district judge was surprised to get a July 3 call from a community nonprofit that was checking on her new registration.

When Sitterly said she hadn’t filled out a registration form � indeed, she’d been regularly voting in the same place on Mountain Road NW in Albuquerque for nearly 20 years � a supervisor with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now promised to destroy the card, Sitterly said in a phone interview.

“He said, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t go anywhere,’ ” she said.

More surprises were in store. She got a call from the Bureau of Elections in the Bernalillo County Clerk’s Office three weeks later, asking again about the registration card, which was missing its required Social Security number.

“They were finishing out the card � they weren’t calling about the fraud,” she said.

Sitterly went to the sixth-floor clerk’s office, got a copy of the card and discovered that it understated her age by three decades.

So, let’s review, shall we?

We have a “former” Democratic political consultant, Eli Lee, running not for profits and pledging to spend a million tax deductible dollars to “educate” voters. We have a Democratic candidate for the PRC [side note: there is no Republican in this race, so I don’t have a partisan motive here] writing big checks to sitting county clerks to help him win the election. And, we have ACORN continuing their well documented efforts to pay good money to submit fraudulent voter registration forms in an effort to undermine the election process.

My only question… When is someone going to jail?