New Mexico

The certified primary's own ballot-style table reports 390,218 voters eligible under the non-affiliated style and 0 ballots cast on it, while the published turnout rate of 24.60% divides 346,460 ballots by all 1,408,181 eligible. Against the two major-party rolls alone the figure is 34.04%. Both numbers come from the same table, and a consumer that reads the headline rate inherits a denominator more than a quarter of which produced no ballot of the style attributed to it.

The state describes itself in its own words as a semi-open primary state where major-party registrants and unaffiliated voters may both participate. That is neither the closed model, where party registration gates the ballot, nor the open model, where anyone takes any ballot. Anything storing primary type as a boolean, or inferring participation rules from a party-registration field, cannot represent it — and the published ballot-style table shows the arrangement produces a category with eligibility and no recorded ballots.

Published county turnout for the same primary runs from Harding at 50.00% to Lea at 14.60%, with the statewide figure at 24.60% sitting closer to the bottom than the middle. Nineteen counties are above the statewide rate and fourteen below, so the statewide number is not a typical county and no county is a proxy for the state. Applying a statewide participation assumption per county is wrong by up to twenty-five points in either direction.

The 2026 general candidate list carries 77 magistrate candidates and 40 probate candidates, alongside district judges and district attorneys, and the results portal keeps Metropolitan Court Judges as a separate category for Bernalillo County alone. So the judicial tier is not one shape but four, three of them county-scoped and one of them unique to a single county. A model with a single judicial office type, or one that expects judges at state level only, cannot hold this.

Of 1,003 local governments the Census counts in New Mexico, 769 are special districts — 77%, against 105 municipalities and 96 school districts. That share is second only to Colorado's 86% in this family, and the composition is distinctive: New Mexico's political subdivisions include acequias, the community irrigation associations that elect their own commissioners and predate the state. Modelling the local layer as municipalities captures roughly a tenth of the state's governments.

New Mexico elects a governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer, auditor and a Commissioner of Public Lands — an office with no counterpart in most states, administering nine million acres of state trust land. A separately elected Public Education Commission sits alongside them. Mapping this onto a standard statewide slate loses two offices and misfiles a third.

New Mexico's results portal runs the same ASP.NET product as South Dakota's and as the North Dakota system that carried elections through 2024 before that state migrated away mid-cycle. The contest-type codes are shared but the categories are not: New Mexico exposes magistrate, metropolitan court and Public Education Commission views that the others have no use for. A harvester written against one deployment's category list will silently miss whole office classes in another.

New Mexico administers 33 counties and the Census counts 33 county governments. Across the Mountain West the discrepancy appears only where consolidated city-counties exist — Colorado 64 against 62, Montana 56 against 54, Nevada 17 against 16 — and nowhere else: Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico all agree exactly. A reconciliation against Census unit counts is therefore safe here and unsafe in three neighbours, for a reason that is knowable in advance.