By ROBERT NOTT and DANIEL CHACÓN
The Santa Fe New Mexican

A Republican lawmaker led a one-man charge to stop a sweeping voting rights bill from succeeding — and he won.

Sen. Bill Sharer, R-Farmington, conducted a lengthy filibuster on the Senate floor Thursday morning with one handy tool in his suit pocket: time.

Sharer spent more than two hours running the clock as he talked about tax policy, the Battle of Glorieta Pass, the Navajo Code Talkers, baseball and almost inexplicably, the celestial alignment of the sun and the moon.

By the time he was finished, it was a few seconds away from noon and the scheduled end of the 30-day legislative session. Sharer’s stream-of-consciousness monologue effectively ended any chance of Senate Bill 144 being passed and moving to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s desk.

Sharer won applause from some on the Senate floor as he concluded. He got derision from others.

Just moments after announcing his stunning decision not to run for re-election, House Speaker Brian Egolf blasted Sharer.

“To deny an opportunity to New Mexicans to have easier access to the ballot, making a mockery of the process by reading the rules of baseball, is a joke,” Egolf said. “It’s sad and he should be ashamed.”

In a news conference not long after the session concluded, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham was more muted in her criticism, but acknowledged her frustration.

“It’s not my first filibuster in the state of New Mexico … I’ve had many bills as both a governor and cabinet secretary that got caught in that environment and I was never happy about it,” she said. “It’s a real disappointment.”

Lujan Grisham said such stall tactics are “very disrespectful” to the people who are working to get their legislation across the finish line.

Sharer’s move came immediately after lawmakers in the House of Representatives spent hours Thursday morning debating the 165-page voting rights bill that critics complained had been cobbled together by Democrats in an effort to force the initiative through on the session’s last day.

Rep. Daymon Ely, D-Corrales, said the bill would make elections “more accessible, more secure, more fair,” and the Democrat-dominated House voted 39-30 to approve the bill before sending it to the Senate for concurrence. But by that time, there was little time left in the session.

The issue of voter access and ensuring accurate election results has become a hot topic nationwide, particularly in the wake of the 2020 general election, in which many supporters of former President Donald Trump charged the election was stolen. Democratic representatives took the floor early Thursday to laud the merits of the bill, with some of them offering personal testimony as to the need for protecting voter rights.

Rep. Kristina Ortez, D-Taos, recalled her grandmother, a migrant worker in the fields of California, registering to vote for the first time with the help of the late U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

She said it reinforced the notion “should always be possible for them and we should do everything in our power to make sure that can happen.” As a result, she said, her grandmother made her feel that if she ever missed a chance to vote “it would be like committing a sin.”

But Rep. Greg Nibert, R-Roswell, said the omnibus legislation was knitted together with portions of three election-related bills and was not properly reviewed nor analyzed by House lawmakers in the final two days of the session.

“I would suggest to this body that a thorough vetting of this bill has not occurred, did not occur,” he said late in the roughly three-hour debate.

Democrats in both the Senate and House first introduced the omnibus bill during a committee hearing Tuesday afternoon. Some members of the public and some county clerks around the state who spoke during that hearing expressed disappointment and dismay, claiming lawmakers were — as one person put it — cramming the bill down the throat of voters late in the game.

The initial voting rights bill, SB 8, was supported by Lujan Grisham and leading Senate Democrats. But it hit roadblocks early on as lawmakers from both parties suggested changes, deletions and amendments.

Later in the session Senate Republicans raised questions about that bill and stalled it through a legislative procedure last weekend.

Because of that, Ely said, Democrats decided to “take the parts and plug them into this bill — not everything… but the things that we thought the public would appreciate and was ready for and was consistent with our philosophy of the bill.”

Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver in a news release said she was “extremely disappointed” by Sharer’s filibuster and the bill’s demise.

“Senate Bill 144 included important provisions to streamline election administration procedures that had buy-in from across the political spectrum,” she said, adding she will work to pass the bill’s policies in a future legislative session.