Clerk points to record; challenger promises changes

May 2—Former County Clerk Geraldine Salazar says she has come out of retirement at others' request to challenge incumbent Katharine Clark.

"I had no interest [in] running again," Salazar said in an interview. "But push came to shove in my own mind. ... I felt compelled to do the work again."

Clark said she is proud to run on her record from the past three years in office because her team has smoothly implemented many changes to improve customer service and access to the ballot.

"Our mission is to make it as easy as possible to vote, public service and ... continuous improvement," she said.

The county clerk runs elections and records and preserves public records such as real estate documents. With no Republicans running, the winner of the June 4 Democratic primary will almost certainly claim the seat.

After serving two terms as clerk from 2013-20, Salazar could not run for reelection — county officials are limited to two consecutive terms — and endorsed Clark, who handily won a five-way Democratic primary in 2020.

In the current race, Clark had raised more than $35,000 in contributions by early April, when candidates submitted their first campaign finance reports. Salazar reported only a $686 contribution from herself.

Salazar blamed the fund-raising difference on time spent campaigning, noting she decided to run for office in late January.

"I'm not worried [about finances] because I think I stand on my record and my broad career in this community, and people know me," she said.

Clark contributed $9,573 to her own campaign, and her largest donation, $5,500, came from her mother. But the other nearly $20,000 she raised through contributions of between $5 and $1,200 shows she has a broad base of support from Democrats and the business community, Clark said. She has spent the money on campaign staff, signs and advertising, she added.

Clark, 42, grew up on the move as an Air Force brat and later attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied neuroscience. It was there she became interested in politics as a union organizer and volunteer for various campaigns, she said.

When her mom moved to Santa Fe in 2012, Clark followed and — as she worked in marketing and IT consulting — became heavily involved with the local and state Democratic parties, working her way up to election as statewide party secretary in 2017. She also received a Master of Business Administration from the University of New Mexico.

Clark decided to run for county clerk in 2020 to help safeguard elections because "elections were becoming more and more under attack," she said. "Elections are where we defend democracy."

Salazar, 70, grew up a "teenage activist" in East Los Angeles, where she and a friend started a program to mentor younger girls. She has lived in Santa Fe, where her husband has deep roots, since the 1970s and has an associate degree in community social services from the College of Santa Fe and a bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of New Mexico.

An "ingrained public servant," as she put it, Salazar worked various jobs, including as a division director of substance abuse services in the state Department of Health. She ran, unsuccessfully, for a state Senate seat in 2004 before she joined the Santa Fe County Clerk's Office in 2008 as a recording clerk. From there, Salazar worked her way up to winning election as clerk in 2012.

She recently decided to run for a third term "based on everyone telling me, 'Geraldine, we need you.' I've tried to be supportive and positive of the current county clerk. I no longer can, and that's why I'm running," she said — to improve customer service, staff morale and "the whole office."

Clark said data shows the opposite: Services at the office have improved over her term.

"Candidates have to make a choice whether they're going to go negative or not. I think I can run on all the great things my team and I have done," she said.

Her biggest successes have included expanding access to the office by digitizing all of its records; enabling people to pay for services with credit cards; building a better elections website, SantaFe.Vote; and initiating a social media presence, Clark said.

The office has also streamlined the voting process by, for example, decreasing unnecessary voter registration paperwork and installing drive-up drop boxes, a first for the state, she said.

"Because Jan. 6 was my third day in office, that's really set the tone for the office. We've had the most changes in laws around elections in the last three years than we had the entire history of New Mexico," Clark said. "There are significant operational challenges now, but we [haven't] seen them as challenges because we're so organized. I don't think voters noticed how seamlessly we integrated same-day registration. I don't think voters noticed that drop boxes were installed because they just worked, you know?"

Salazar said her priorities during her two terms in office were improving customer service and employee wages and "bringing people together from diverse backgrounds in the interests of the people."

She is most proud of how she and her staff handled the 2020 election. In the 2020 primary, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the office was "inundated" with absentee ballots and took three days after polls closed to finish counting votes. After that, Salazar worked with a vendor to streamline the processing of absentee ballots in time for the general election, and by November, "we were prepared for the absentee ballots that were mailed in," she said.

Shortly after taking office in 2013, Salazar also withstood pressure from her own party to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, she said. One month prior, in arguments filed in the state Supreme Court, the attorney general had written that denying licenses to same-sex couples was unconstitutional, but justices did not immediately take up the issue, The New Mexican reported.

Residents sued Salazar, and the court directed her office to issue licenses regardless of gender. She said at the time she supported same-sex marriage but wanted clear legal direction before making any change.

"Once in the office, when you are the county clerk, you represent everyone," Salazar said in a recent interview. "If you don't represent everyone, they will not trust you and the work you're doing."