For electoral officials in New Mexico, voting season begins long before election day, with a summer event known as Election School, where county clerks and some of their staff gather in Albuquerque.
Some of the curriculum is regular bureaucracy, updated forms and so forth, said Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver at the bustling August event at the Embassy Suites hotel. But some is now about how to handle threats or actual violence.
And something else new is stress management, as clerks and their staff face a marked increase in scrutiny and criticism.
"A lot of them, they're dealing with a lot of new issues that they've never dealt with before," she said. "Not just not supported by, but attacked by their own county commissioners, their own local elected officials that they rely on for support to do their jobs."
As false allegations that elections are not secure mushroomed across the country in the wake of former President Donald Trump's fraudulent claims that he won the 2020 election, senior officials in New Mexico assured voters that the electoral system functions fairly and transparently.
But as election-denier activists like former professor David Clements and his wife Erin have gained influence in the state, some citizens and local officials have become convinced by their arguments, and many focus their effort to change the system on the state's 33 elected county clerks.
The clerks' lives have consequently changed.
"After 2020, it's just been complete chaos," said Yvonne Otero, clerk of Torrance County, while attending Election School. People show up at every biweekly county commission meeting, she said, using the public comment period to make allegations. "'This is wrong, and this and this and you shouldn't be doing this.'"
Otero said people wait for her and her staff to leave the office at the end of the day in an effort to continue making allegations.
"We go out to the stores and they follow us so they can start talking to us," she said.
Otero is a Republican in a largely conservative county of about 15,000 people, where she has lived all her life. Some of the people who now criticize her publicly were her students when she worked as a substitute teacher.
"I'm just amazed," she said. "It's hard to explain, but it's just like — what happened?"
At a Torrance County commission meeting on August 24, several people used public comment to air conspiracy theories and make allegations about the clerk.
"We feel that our elections have a lack of integrity, and there's a group of us citizen auditors, we've been looking through things of concern that we've found," said Rob Wagner.
When asked later about the roots of his concerns, Wagner cited a presentation David and Erin Clements were invited to give at a Torrance County Commission meeting in May this year, in which they repeated false allegations that Dominion Voting Systems machines are hackable.
"The clerks aren't machine experts," said David Clements in the May 25 meeting. "If you're to crack open the motherboard, they're not going to be able to tell you what microchip does what, whether something is Bluetooth accessible."
County Commissioner Ryan Schwebach said he granted a constituent request to have the Clementses speak, in an effort to alleviate widespread concerns about election security.
"The last thing we want to do is disrupt an election and disenfranchise voters and all the stuff you hear on the media," he said in a telephone interview. "The goal is to simply show that our election system is accurate."
But the commissioners and county staff now scrutinize the county clerk more closely. After monitoring the process of certifying vote-counting machines, the county manager complained to the Secretary of State's office that the clerk hadn't followed procedure. The Secretary of State's office gave guidance to re-do the process.
But the commission filed a complaint against Otero with the Attorney General requesting to remove her from her position. The complaint also includes allegations of inappropriate workplace behavior.
The county also conducted a hand recount of the ballots from the June primary. The results showed discrepancies, though nothing that would have changed the outcome of a race.
Otero did not respond to a recent request for comment. But speaking in August, she said some days the job was too much.
"I didn't run for this," she said. "Because it wasn't like this. I didn't have all this drama, I didn't have all this stress, being attacked."
Statewide pressures
The Attorney-General's office is looking into the allegations against Otero, but the pressures she describes are mirrored to varying degrees by the experiences of county clerks across the state.
In Doña Ana County, clerk Amanda López Askin became the target of Republican ire even before 2020, when Democratic candidate Xochitl Torres Small narrowly won a Congressional race over Republican Yvette Herrell, who briefly alleged fraud.
"I was accused of taking home things, and ballots in my trunk," she said. "My appearance was criticized, my integrity was criticized."
That criticism has continued since then, at commission meetings and online. She campaigned for a new law that would criminalize intimidation of election officials.
At a September 27 Doña Ana County Commission meeting, veteran Mark Vieth called for changes to electoral process during public comment and said that he had been inspired to do so after attending a presentation given by the Clementses in a local church, who had specifically asked people to go to county commission meetings and repeat their claims.
In Sandoval County, which like Torrance County saw protests over the certification of the primary election results earlier this year, clerk Anne Brady-Romero described multiple people coming to every meeting to demand forensic audits of election results.
"There is no such thing as a forensic audit in an election," she said, exasperated, adding that at least one person who regularly attends meetings is in fact from neighboring Bernalillo county, and said publicly that she had been invited to attend the Sandoval meetings by an unspecified county commissioner.
The most prominent example of election denial at the county level has been in Otero County, where outspoken Trump supporter Couy Griffin was recently removed from office as commissioner because of the role he played in the events of January 6, 2021.
Prior to his removal, an Otero County Commission meeting also hosted the Clementses in June, after they participated in an unofficial election audit.
"If I was in your position I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night," Griffin said to clerk Robyn Holmes, after hearing claims from the couple. The meeting was during the primary elections. "You're in the middle of elections that are fraudulent right now, if what they're telling us is true."
And even in strongly Democratic Santa Fe county, clerk Katharine Clark said that conspiracy theories are widespread.
"People come into the lobby, actually often they're there for other business," she said. "But then they'll start talking about how the elections are stolen, or how people have voted five or six times."
She said that the nature of the job has entirely changed, now requiring knowledge not just of process and rules, but of technology and media.
"What you say and how you say it is really going to influence what people think," she said. "And you've got to be proactive about your media strategy, you can't be reactive, you've got to be there trying to prevent misinformation on all platforms."
Bracing for midterms
Many clerks express a desire to keep doing their job running elections, despite the pressures on them individually and on the voting system as a whole.
"We're going to move forward, because that's our job. We have no other choice," said López Askin of Doña Ana County. "Does that mean that I'm not aware that there's these concentrated plans to disrupt? Of course, we all know that, but it doesn't stop any of us from moving forward.
But they are bracing for the midterms to be tough. State officials have issued an advisory about intimidation at polling stations, and raised concerns about election deniers registering as poll challengers.
Sec. Maggie Toulouse Oliver does worry about their staying power, saying some clerks are considering retirement or not running for re-election when their terms are up.
"A lot of them are sort of wondering about their futures," she said.
