Candidates for Otero County Elections Questions from ATN

Municipal elections are the most important elections in having a direct impact on individuals. Voters are impacted more by local actions than any other level of government. However, fewer voters participate in municipal elections and school board elections than any other political election. Our goal is to provide information via KALHRadio.org and our online platform at AlamogordoTownNews.com to help local voters access the issues and the talent seeking your support and ultimately your vote. 

With that consideration we allow the Republican and Democratic Parties as platform in our news coverage to discuss their respective positions. 

The Republican Party has been collaborative as a party as has leadership excepting for Rep John Block and Karl Melton.

The local Democratic Party leadership won’t engage with us because of our coverage and exposure of the State investigation and the local party disfunction. However, the state Democratic Party engages with us in the absence of local leadership.  We also allow a platform for independents and libertarians when they engage with us. All voices are welcome a platform as long as respectful and fact based commentary. We allow comments on our platforms for dialog but will remove commentary that turns personal or is an attack on an individual as we represent free speech but we don’t support hate speech and hostility. 

As such we have been advocating participation in the nonpartisan forums sponsored by The League of Women’s Voters Southern New Mexico Otero Unit. We also have submitted a series of questions to each candidate for every elected office that is contested in Otero County. 

We compiled list of questions we have submitted to each group of candidates. We broke the questions into 3 groups - city or village offices, School Board, and water and sanitation district questions.  The candidates have until 10-20-23 to respond to us with answers. After we gather their responses we will share their responses with our readers and listeners on our variety of platforms.

Those candidates not responding will be noted in our coverage.

We believe the public has a right to receive as much candidate information as possible from a variety of outside sources.

Media has a responsibility to dig, investigate, question and report. The public has a responsibility to gather information and make an informed decision and then of course vote. We look forward to providing the results of our questions for the candidates to our readers over the next few weeks. 

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