FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, February 13, 2007

CONTACT: Whitney Potter (505) 266 5915 ext. 1003 Cell (505) 507 9898; or James Scarantino (505) 366-7873

Albuquerque—A federal judge struck down Albuquerque’s Voter ID law yesterday “because it imposes a significant burden on the fundamental right to vote, and because that burden is not narrowly tailored to meet the City’s interest in preventing voter impersonation at the polls.”  The ruling results from a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Mexico filed in October, 2005 on behalf of the League of Woman Voters and Bernalillo County, Inc., among other plaintiffs.

“The law created an unfair, unequal system of voting,” said ACLU Executive Director, Peter Simonson.  “It treated people who voted in person as suspicious, but exempted people who voted absentee from any ID requirements at all.  Ironically, it gave a pass to the very type of vote that is most susceptible to fraud.”

In her ruling, Judge Christina Armijo noted that the City of Albuquerque failed to present “evidence of voter fraud or voting irregularities among Albuquerque voters who vote in person at their precinct polling place on election day.”  Indeed, the most convincing evidence of voter fraud lay with absentee voting.  Testimony by former NM State Election Director Denise Lamb “cite[d] several examples of schemes or ploys that reportedly were used to defraud or disenfranchise voters using absentee voting procedures.”

ACLU attorney James Scarantino said, “The judge underscored the truly cynical nature of this law.  The people of Albuquerque were sold voter ID as a preventive measure for voter impersonation, when in fact the law fixed what didn’t need fixing.  And it left the only real source of fraud—absentee voting--unchecked.”

Scarantino noted that the Albuquerque City Council was warned in June 2005 by City Councilor Michael Cadigan that the disparate treatment of in-person and absentee voters would prove to be unconstitutional.

“They should not have blocked Cadigan’s efforts to plug the loop-hole for absentee voters,” Scarantino said.

ACLU Director Simonson said, “With this decision I think we’ve started a trend in which the courts are looking with much greater skepticism on laws that impose burdensome ID requirements on voters.  Hopefully our state legislators will take this into account in the next several weeks as they consider bills proposing new voter ID requirements.”

The ACLU recognized Scarantino in 2006 as its “Cooperating Attorney of the Year” for his outstanding work on the voter ID lawsuit.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: Monday, February 5, 2007 CONTACT: Whitney Potter (505) 266 5915 ext. 1003 Cell (505) 507 9898 or Paul Cates (212) 549-2568 Cell (917) 566-1294
ALBUQUERQUE – The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit today against the state of New Mexico on behalf of three lesbian couples seeking retirement health insurance for the domestic partners of lesbian and gay state employees.
“After serving the state for 25 years, I hoped to retire with the same peace of mind as my straight colleagues,” said Ellen Novak.   “But retirement has meant that my partner has had to switch to costly private health insurance with inferior coverage at the point in our lives when we are most likely to face health problems.  I worked just as hard as my colleagues, so it doesn’t seem fair that my family has been saddled with this burden.”
Novak, who has been with her partner Linda McCreary for 15 years, was forced to retire in 2004 after being diagnosed with a chronic lung condition.  When she was still working for the state, she was able to provide McCreary health insurance as her domestic partner, but because of the state’s unfair policy of denying retirees domestic partner coverage, McCreary’s domestic partner coverage was terminated when Novak was forced to retire.  Married couples in the same situation are permitted to continue to provide health insurance to their spouses after retirement.
The lawsuit filed today charges that the state’s policy of denying lesbian and gay state retirees equal health insurance for their partners violates the state constitution’s equality guarantees.  Unlike their straight colleagues, lesbian and gay employees are barred from marrying in the state and therefore, in the absence of domestic partner benefits, are denied equal compensation.
“Lesbian and gay employees make commitments and form families just like straight employees, and their families have the same needs,” said Peter Simonson, Executive Director of the ACLU of New Mexico.  “Health insurance is an important portion of how employees are compensated.  It’s not right for the state to take care of straight families, but to force gay and lesbian families to bear the significant expense and suffer the inferior coverage of private health insurance at the point in their lives when they need health care most.”
In 2003, Governor Bill Richardson issued an executive order providing state employees, both gay and straight, with the option of providing their partners health insurance through domestic partner coverage.  Under the order, domestic partner coverage is not available to employees after they retire, while spousal coverage is provided.
Proposed legislation, SB 502, which was introduced by Senator John Grubesic and will be the subject of a committee hearing this Wednesday, would close the loophole and provide benefits to the domestic partners of retired employees.
“The state legislature has the opportunity to spare taxpayers the needless expense of defending this lawsuit by passing this bill,” said Simonson.  “The cost of providing the domestic partners of state employees with access to retirement health insurance would only result in less than a one percent increase in claims dollars paid out by the authority.  And this nominal cost would likely be offset by the savings to the state on account of having more people insured.”
The other two couples involved in the lawsuit are:
Havens Levitt and Rebecca Dakota -- This Albuquerque couple has been together for 11 years, but have know each other for 25.  Levitt, 54, has been a teacher for more than 23 years with the Albuquerque public school system.  Dakota, 52, works for an anti-smoking campaign and as the part-time director of the Albuquerque Independent Business Alliance.  Because her jobs are both part-time, she relies on Levitt to provide her health insurance.  When Levitt retires, Dakota will no longer have access to health insurance and will be forced to pay for private insurance, which is especially expensive for someone of her age.
Mary Meyer and Hope Miner -- This Sandoval County couple has been together for 13 years and is raising two children together.  Meyer, who manages the WIC Nutrition Program for Bernalillo and Sandoval Counties, has worked for the New Mexico Department of Health for 22 years.  Miner retired from the Albuquerque school system in 2003 after serving as an elementary teacher for 25 years.  When domestic partner benefits became available, the couple decided to have Meyer cover Miner as a domestic partner in order to avoid the double fees the couple had to pay towards their separate health plans.  After Miner retired, the couple learned that the domestic partner coverage would no longer be available once Meyer retired.  When Meyer retires, the couple’s monthly expenses will increase because they will both be required to contribute to their own health plans.
The legal team for the ACLU in Novak and McCreary v. New Mexico is George Bach, staff attorney with the ACLU of New Mexico, Ken Choe, a senior staff attorney with the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project of the ACLU, and cooperating attorney Maureen Sanders of Sanders & Westbrook, P.C.
Biographical information for all of the couples, a Q&A about the lawsuit and the legal papers filed today are available at www.aclu.org/caseprofiles.

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Related Documents

DP Retiree Benefits Complaint

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Q & A

Memo: Cost of domestic partnerships for retirees in New Mexico

February 2, 2007
To:       Nora Ranney, ACLU
From:   M. V. Lee Badgett, Ph.D. Research Director, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law
Re:       Cost of domestic partnerships for retirees in New Mexico
SB 502 would allow retirees in the New Mexico Retiree Health Care Authority (RHCA) to enroll a domestic partner for health care benefits.  The Fiscal Impact Report prepared by the Legislative Finance Committee staff predicts an annual increase in costs to the RHCA of approximately $3 million.  The analysts base their estimate on the assumption that 5% of retirees will enroll a partner since 5% of active employees have enrolled a partner for benefits. Data from Census 2000 suggests that the rate of enrollment would be significantly lower for retirees in the near term, however, which dramatically reduces the reasonable estimate of increased health care expenditures to less than $1 million per year.
Census 2000 includes questions that allow identification of people who have an “unmarried partner.”  The partner can be either a same-sex partner or a different-sex partner.   Using the public use data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau on households in New Mexico, we calculated the proportion of people aged 18 to 61 who had a same-sex partner and compared it with the proportion of people aged 62 and older who had a same-sex partner.    In the younger group (age 18-61), 7.8% of people had an unmarried partner.  In the older group, 1.5% of people had an unmarried partner.  In other words, people in the younger group were five times more likely to have an unmarried partner than were older people.  (These comparisons are almost identical if we use a cut-off of age 60.)
Two points are worth making.  First, the Census data cannot tell us why the unmarried partnership rates differ so strikingly by age, but the difference likely relates to differences by age in couples’ desire to marry.  Over time, the older group of New Mexicans, and probably state retirees, might look more like the younger group in terms of the proportion with an unmarried partner, but it would take many years before the two groups would be identical in rates.
Second, the fact that the domestic partner enrollment rate of active state employees is lower than the rate in the population as a whole likely reflects two factors:  the fact that domestic partner benefits are considered taxable income by the IRS, and the fact that many domestic partners of state employees will have health insurance from their own employers.  A recent study of national data that I coauthored found that a fraction of employees with partners take up the opportunity to enroll a partner, which is consistent with the New Mexico state employee data.
This difference in partnership rates among older New Mexicans is important for understanding the costs to the RHCA over at least the next decade.  Since the partnership rate among people 62 and older is one-fifth that of younger people, we would expect the domestic partner enrollment rate for retirees to be 1%, which is one-fifth the enrollment rate of active (and presumably younger) employees.  Accordingly, the total cost to the state would also be approximately one-fifth of that estimated by the Legislative Finance Committee, or $680,000 in FY08 (which is 0.4% of budgeted FY08 claims) and $1.6 million over three years.