Richard Abraham, owner of Business Computing Solutions, said Bernalillo County is seeing an influx of voters who are newly registered but that a large number of them have not been entered in the state's system yet.

"There are still about 15,000 registrations that haven't been processed," he said.

New voters may risk having their votes counted as provisional and possibly thrown out, Abraham said.

"Let's say for example that those people go in to vote and they've never voted before," he said. "They're going to be put on a provisional ballot no matter where they go - even if they go to an early voting site."

Abraham said lawyers from the Republican and Democratic parties often argue over which provisional ballots qualify.

"There's a whole bunch of reasons they can disqualify a provisional ballot," he said. "They may not be able to read the signature. They may not be able to verify the address. In some cases it may be a wrong address. Any small anomaly can get that ballot thrown out."

Students can avoid these potential problems by voting in the precinct where they are registered, which they can determine by looking up their name and birth date on their County Clerk's Web site.

Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver said that in a close election, the deciding factor for a candidate could come down to a legal argument over provisional ballots.
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