From the County Chair – Just the Facts
By Alex Piland, Chair, DPSC
March 2023 was a hard month. It was full of meetings where we had to look at many spreadsheets. (Believe me, for this old English teacher, that is a hard task, indeed!) I am going to switch my left-brain on and give you some numbers.
The smallest unit of our party organization is a precinct. Precincts are determined based on number of voters; the legislature sets the number of people in a precinct. We have 157 precincts in our county. We are currently trying to fill Precinct Chair positions. Our goal this election cycle is to find precinct chairs for a minimum of 51% of our precincts. Let’s try to exceed that 51%!
Precincts are organized into groups called Wards. When we reorganized, we had approximately 10 precincts in a ward, but our county is the fastest growing county in the state, so we have already added more precincts to our county – almost twenty in two years! I hope that means more DEMOCRATS!
We have 13 Wards, A through M. It has been a task trying to cover even half of the wards. The highest Ward Chair count we had this past two years was 7, but we fell to five at one point. We are starting this election cycle with Ward Chairs in Wards A, B, C, D, F, I, J, and M. We still have open seats in E, G, H, K, and L. One of the organizing goals of the Executive Committee is to have 100% coverage of the wards.
We have 254 Sandoval County Central Committee (CCC) positions, and we have 104 people identified as 2023-2025 Sandoval County Central Committee Members. The 2023-2025 County Central Committee members elected the Democratic Party of Sandoval County party leadership, one Chair and two Vice Chairs, and 36 State Central Committee members on March 25th. Additionally, CCC members will vote on new and changing rules through March 2025.
As you may know State Central Committee (SCC) members are divided into districts based on our Congressional House Districts. There are two Congressional House Districts in Sandoval County, Congressional District 1 (CD-1) which is served by U.S. Representative Melanie Stansbury, and Congressional District 3 (CD-3), which is served by U.S. Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez. CD-1 has 31 State Central Committee seats. Three of the CD-1 seats are taken off of the top for Sandoval County party leadership. That leaves 28 State Central Committee Seats for CD-1, and CD-3 has 5 State Central Committee seats. The Rules that govern the Democratic Party of New Mexico state that we must have gender equality in our representative positions. That means the 28 seats in CD-1 need to have non-cisgender, female, and male SCC members represented as equally as possible. For example, the Sandoval County 2021 SCC members consisted of one non-cisgender member, and 14 members who identified as male, and 13 members who identified as female.
These elections have consumed much of our time this past month. If you can help fill a vacancy, please let me know. You can email me at chair@sandovaldemocrats.org, or you can call or text me at 505-350-6590.
In solidarity,
