To prevent hackers, foreign enemies, and other bad guys from meddling with democracy, the New Mexico Secretary of State works with the Air National Guard in a complicated operation that keeps the process running smoothly on Election Day

by Michael Benanav
Searchlight New Mexico

On an afternoon in early October, inside a bland, beige office on Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base, two uniformed servicemen are sitting at desks, their eyes scanning computer monitors. Both are members of a team coordinated by the Cyber Unit of New Mexico’s Air National Guard that helps ensure New Mexico’s election security. At the moment, they’re engaged in what’s called “active threat hunting” — searching for signs that someone, somewhere, might be trying to break into any of the state’s systems related to voting.

“We look for any malicious activity,” says Master Sergeant Ray Torres, a guardsman who works with the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office and the Department of Homeland Security to safeguard elections.

While it’s impossible to hack into voting machines, which are “air-gapped” — meaning they’re never connected to the internet — voter registration rolls and other components of election infrastructure exist online.

“We’ve had nation-states poking around in our websites and our online systems,” says Maggie Toulouse Oliver, New Mexico’s Secretary of State, whose office is responsible for running elections. The first time this occurred, as far as she’s aware, was in 2016. The country poking around? Russia. 

“No actual election outcomes were affected, but that raised huge concerns,” she says. “Our cybersecurity posture has improved dramatically since then.”

Knowing this, foreign adversaries have attempted to meddle in American elections in recent years. And frequent and false claims by Donald Trump and others in the GOP that the 2020 presidential election was stolen have become a rallying cry for his supporters. Election officials know there’s an imperative to safeguard the integrity of the vote — and to counter widespread disinformation that amplifies lies about rigged voting results.

“The military is nonpartisan,” Torres says. “We can’t show favoritism. We just make sure the election is fair.”

Describing the threats his team looks out for, Torres explains that some hackers “just want to cause havoc. But some state actors might want to get a foothold in the network to see what they can find, and then use that information to possibly throw the result of an election.” Many bots, he says, are automatically blocked by software. “What we’re really looking for is a ‘zero-day exploit’ — something never before seen in the wild, a new vulnerability or strategy to get into the system.”

New Mexico’s online systems haven’t always been this secure. “We’ve had nation-states poking around in our websites and our online systems,” says Maggie Toulouse Oliver, New Mexico’s secretary of state, whose office is responsible for running elections. The first time this occurred, as far as she’s aware, was in 2016. The country poking around? Russia. 

“No actual election outcomes were affected, but that raised huge concerns,” she says during an interview at her office in Santa Fe. “Our cybersecurity posture has improved dramatically since then.”

The secretary’s office has its own election security program, which Toulouse Oliver describes as “the first line of defense.” Among its many activities: conducting post-election audits to verify that the vote count is 100 percent accurate; mandating the use of paper ballots; and certifying voting machines. Her office also works closely with an array of partners, including New Mexico’s Department of Information Technology, as well as federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of Justice.

According to Toulouse Oliver, most genuine risks to election integrity involve politically motivated efforts to disenfranchise voters or spread disinformation that influences how people vote. “It’s almost impossible to tamper with a voting machine that’s actively deployed in an election,” she says.

On Election Day, paper ballots are scanned into air-gapped voting machines. When the polls close, the memory cards from those machines are uploaded to another air-gapped system before the results are entered into a system that’s connected to the internet — “So that we’re preserving the record,” Toulouse Oliver says. In addition to tallying the votes, the machines save a digitally scanned image of every ballot, just in case something were to happen to the paper originals.

While statewide rules match the best practices recommended by the U.S. Election Election Assistance Commission, Santa Fe County takes it a step further. According to County Clerk Katharine E. Clark, officials use vote tabulators with GPS trackers so that they know if the tabulators have been moved to any place they’re not supposed to be.

“We have redundancy built into the system,” Toulouse Oliver says. “A lot of people, if they were to say, this is what I think needs to happen in order to make elections more secure — all that stuff is actually already happening. It’s like, no, we already thought of this!”

Contact: UCB PAO, ucbpao@usbr.gov

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The Bureau of Reclamation is set to evaluate the performance of El Vado Dam through a ‘first fill test’ over the coming months. This test will involve incrementally raising the water level in El Vado Reservoir to assess the dam’s stability and performance at various elevations.

The results of the first fill test will help Reclamation better understand the reservoir and the potential water storage opportunity that may exist there while undergoing Reclamation’s Safety of Dams process to develop and implement a long-term solution.

Reclamation, Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Users Association, and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District are finalizing an agreement to allow the option of storing water that originates in the Rio Grande basin in the Abiquiu Reservoir for up to 10 years. It also allows the continued operation of the Middle Rio Grande project while Reclamation moves forward with any necessary Safety of Dams improvements at El Vado Dam.

“We are grateful to our partners at the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, and the city of Santa Fe for their collaboration in using their water resources for this important evaluation,” said Reclamation Albuquerque Area Office Manager Jennifer Faler. “We are optimistic that the first fill test this winter will pave the way for water storage in El Vado Reservoir as we explore revised construction solutions to address the dam’s issues.”

In 2022, Reclamation lowered the water level in El Vado Reservoir to facilitate necessary repairs. An assessment during this period revealed that the dam’s steel faceplate and supporting structures were in significantly worse condition than previously understood. Consequently, in March 2024, construction was halted, and a suspension of work was issued to the project contractor due to unforeseen field conditions that presented numerous challenges.

Reclamation remains committed to rehabilitating El Vado Dam in partnership with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. Under the Safety of Dams program, we are developing strategies to reduce seepage through the dam while ensuring mission-critical water deliveries and storage objectives are met.

Reclamation is actively engaging with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and other stakeholders to ensure the safe operation of El Vado Dam.
For more information, please visit our webpage 

In which I relate to the staging of "Cebollas" in Santa Fe.
By Zach Hively
​
A trip to the theater offers us a moment to pause in our own overwhelming lives. Sometimes, we just need that break from driving places and interacting with other people who might, a little too often, be just a little too much like ourselves for comfort.
Yes, granted, the theater has people in it. However—it’s superior to the cinema, with its fake people on screen, because the people in theatrical seats actually mostly shut up during the show lest they get called on stage for some Surprise Improv! as punishment for disturbing the play.
So it was with this need for escapism that I entered the Santa Fe Playhouse last Friday night to watch Cebollas, a new play by New Mexico wright Leonard Madrid.

​​My week leading up to this had been full. I had driven from Colorado Springs to Albuquerque (after driving, a few days prior, from Albuquerque to Colorado Springs, as round trips tend to go). Then I had spent some time with family in the 505 (including none of my four sisters, though yes I have four sisters. This will matter in a moment).

All this to say: I yearned for ninety minutes free of relatives and the open road, with a bit of good ol’ comedy.

What is this new play about? Well, it opens on a dead man (Mitchell, played stonily by Mitchell) in Albuquerque, which landed a little close to home. Three sisters must load his inanimate body into their car and return it to his home—before morning—in Denver. Nearly the entire play takes place on I-25, including, obviously, a stop at IKEA, because every New Mexican is obligated to stop at IKEA when we have a car with some free space left over.

Highway signs denote all the locations along the way. All the locations, that is, that I had just driven through—twice.

So much for escapism. I had only regret, because I had missed the IKEA. At least I didn’t have my sisters with me for the drive. Nor a Mitchell.

However, it became promptly apparent that these three sisters are funnier than mine, likely because (unlike my own sisters) their lines had been workshopped.

Yolie, the distant youngest (played by Cristina Vigil), sports a sunny dress, a nine-month bump, and a dead Mitchell in her living room armchair. Celia (Vanessa Rios y Valles) rocks the nurse scrubs and a recent conversion to lesbianism. And the elder sister—and thus the one with my greatest sympathies—is Tere (Christina Martos), already tired at the start from holding everyone’s crap together and the only one with a purse I trusted held granola bars, tissues, bandaids, and a paperback book thick enough to smack sisters (hers or anyone else’s) upside the head.

I’m used to the theater whisking me to some far-off place and time: Shakespearean England, for instance, or Shakespearean Italy. But these three sisters? They sounded all familiar. Like the people I grew up with, dropping Spanish words in ways I understand but am too gringo to do myself, adding plurals to words like no one else does—you don’t even know. The accent I have pieces of, sometimes, without even realizing it, so people abroad think I must be all Canadian or something because they can’t place it.

Look, I’m a straight white dude in the US of A. I see myself more or less represented everywhere I look, except for like Taylor Swift concerts. I’m not used to feeling quite so at home when I see myself represented, though, as I was at Cebollas. Not a hundred percent, of course; I am not a hermana from Burque, after all. But I might feel more comfortable than Mitch does, that Colorado womanizer, buckled in the backseat with sunglasses on and Burqueña sisters having it out with each other.

No spoilers here, ’kay? I just want to say that this production crew staged Cebollas magnificently for staging it so minimally. Even the scene breaks incorporate bridge plot as the sisters help rearrange the bare-boned car and hoist Mitchell from one compromising spot to another, unclear if they’re actually committing any kind of crime, but knowing it gets worse when they cross into colorful (and repetitively so) Colorado.

And those sisters? They attain more tenderness, more connection, more self-awareness than my sisters ever gain in a single hour-and-a-half timeframe. These three characters pull off real sisterhood—I bought it, and I know sisters.

If any one thing felt untrue—in a play very good at plucking out what feels true—it’s this: No one can make it from Albuquerque to Denver that fast. Not with so many stops; especially not with one at a casino gas station. And not with all the construction happening around Pueblo at the moment. Trust me; you don’t even know.

Cebollas will perform on the main stage of the Santa Fe Playhouse (142 East De Vargas Street, Santa Fe, NM) through November 10, 2024. Performances are on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30 pm and Sundays at 2 pm.
Read here for more information about the production.

~SVDP

This weekend, November 2 & 3, St Thomas the Apostles’ St. Vincent de Paul’s Conference kicks off the SVDP Thanksgiving food drive.  We are asking our community to donate nonperishable food items (list attached) or money donations to prepare Thanksgiving food boxes for our local families who might not have a dinner without our assistance.

We also invite our community members to identify families by names, addresses and phone numbers (if available) and number in family who would benefit from a Thanksgiving food box to Pauline at 505-685-1153 or mail donations to:

St. Thomas the Apostle Parish PO Box 117, Abiquiu, NM 87510.
A receipt will be provided upon request.

SVDP will purchase turkeys and hams for the boxes. The collection of the food items will be after masses on November 17 with delivery on the 24th. 

Want to help or contribute? We will be gathering food items until the November 24,  at which time we will put together food boxes and make deliveries. If anyone wants to help organize the food in boxes, they are welcome to join us at the Parish Hall at 2:00 pm.
 
SVDP helps everyone in need regardless of their religion, gender, political beliefs, etc. Anyone in need just has to call Pauline at the Parish Office and we will follow up with assistance.

By Peter Nagle

​Things are going great in the stock market, and that’s wonderful. If you’re invested, enjoy it. The thing is, markets don’t go up in a straight line. They never have anyway. There are these events called “corrections” that occur regularly. A nice word for “your account is going down in value - rapidly”. 
 
Yes corrections today, few and far between as they’ve been - which is very unusual - happen very quickly. You can be down 10 or 20% in a week. It’s shocking when that happens. Very shocking.
 
In my own view, I see a significant correction coming in the next 6 months or so. By “significant” I mean somewhere between 15 and 30%. The faster and farther it goes up….
 
The question is not when will it happen and how bad will it be. It will, in my view, and it will be. The question is how will you react? Will you sell in a knee jerk reaction? Will you put blinders on and cover your ears so to speak and try to ignore it? Will you just hold on for dear life? 
 
These are common reactions, we’re only human after all. I’ve been in this business for over 40 years and one thing I do know is that our emotions and our money do not mix well at all. As hard as it can be, we need to make emotionless decisions when it comes to money. We have to be a bit hard and cold about the way we think about our money. 
 
If you’re in it for the long haul then you have to have a plan on how to take advantage of the up years, and how to survive the down periods. Remember: corrections now tend to be short and severe, while rallies tend to be long and drawn out. Actually I think we can be kind of thankful for that!
 
The thing is, not to “react”. It’s better to anticipate than react and put a plan in place to ride out the storm, whenever it may come. What do I mean by that? Put your portfolio now in a position to ride through the inevitable downturn well. So how can I do this? 
 
Increase cash. That’s the first step. I see money managers selling stocks and increasing cash positions right now. I see Warren Buffett doing the same thing. These people are smart, and they are in the market all the time. And they’re emotionless about their money. That’s how we must be. And if they’re reducing exposure to stocks, shouldn’t we?
 
If you decide to do that, look at your portfolio and determine how much you want to raise the cash level to. Increasing to 25-50% would not be unusual. Yeah, it’s painful to sell some of the winners and take gains (taxable if you’re in a taxable account). There’s a bit of pain involved is doing this. You can’t avoid the emotion of “will I regret this?” But you either have to do it or not. And not is fine IF you won’t “react” in a correction and sell then. That is almost always a mistake. Make your decision and live with it, that’s what you need to do.
 
The benefit of this strategy is that, when the correction does happen, you’ll feel like you’ve already taken action to survive, maybe even thrive, and on top of that you’ll have lots of cash to buy when things get cheaper. 
 
It’s nice to get something at a discount, right? This is how stocks go on sale - at a time when your emotions scream “Don’t buy, it’s gone down a lot, and it’s never going to stop!” - is precisely when you need to get past that emotion and act. Buy good stocks whenever they go on sale. That’s the key. That’s what Warren Buffett does. Then you’ll actually be taking advantage of a correction, instead of falling prey to the emotions it causes. 
 
Peter J Nagle
Guaranteed Income Specialist
Thoughtful Income Advisory
Abiquiu, NM 87510
505-423-5378
Thoughtfulincome@gmail.com

By Jessica Rath​​

​Maybe you’ve attended one of concert violist John Graham’s performances at his spacious house up on a mesa in Abiquiú, or maybe you remember him from the Abiquiú Chamber Music Festival where he was featured for several seasons. Or maybe his music isn’t your cup of tea… Either way, here is another artist who chose the breath-taking scenery of northern New Mexico because it enhances his creativity and innovative skills. John is not only a stellar, award-winning  solo violist whose career took him to Beijing, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and other places around the world, but he also played a significant role in establishing the viola as a solo instrument. He incorporates electronic technology and has inspired new music for the instrument.

I was present at a few of John’s performances in Abiquiú, and thus was familiar with his outstanding musicianship and innovative techniques. But when I met with John to interview him for the Abiquiú News, I got a rare glimpse into the mind of an artist and performer,  learning about his relationship with his instrument and with the audience.
 
John grew up in California and got his first violin when he was seven years old. He found a little black case tucked away on one of the shelves in the house of his grandfather who played folk music with his guitar and harmonica. When John asked what it was, his grandfather showed him the child-sized violin inside and told him that he had been waiting for one of his grandchildren to ask about it. “It’s yours, John!”, he said.
 
That was the beginning. His parents found a teacher, and John started taking lessons – everything about music was fascinating and entrancing to him.
 
When he was in eighth grade, John was studying with a woman who had been a professional player. She introduced him to the idea of pursuing a career as a performing artist. “But you’ll have to practice more”, she told him. His fellow classmates spent after-school hours playing tennis or football or chess, joining clubs according to their interests, working on the year-book – social activities where kids do something together. Practicing a musical instrument for several hours a day wouldn’t allow any of this. John’s teacher had a suggestion: the summer before his freshman year she wanted him to prepare a recital program, and in the fall he should perform in public what he had practiced. John accepted the challenge, and the performance was a sound success. It taught John to be disciplined and focused, to practice regularly, and to follow the allure of music: “It draws you in to go further and further”, he said.
 
He started college at the San Francisco Conservatory and finished at U.C.Berkeley. It was a time of growth for John: he felt that some of the other students had more experience and were ahead of him. But he always took this and music itself as a challenge which would drive him further on his adventurous journey. For all his life, challenges would spurn him on to go deeper, to discover more.

“In the classical music world there is a very traditional hierarchy of instruments for what is considered great music, what is almost great music, what is just sort of mediocre music. Everything is being graded all the time, and that part of it never appealed to me. I never felt challenged to be the next best or something else. I was on my own pathway, and my teachers understood that.  I was really fortunate to have teachers who understood me.  I think they respected the journey I was on and that was fortunate; they never said, ‘You're good enough to do this, but maybe not that’.”

 I was curious: “First you started with the violin, but then you turned to the viola, why?”, I asked John. Here is what he told me:

“When I was a teenager, Columbia Artists Management offered community concerts in small towns. They had a nationwide program featuring their artists and other well known performers. If one of them was coming to perform in Oakland or Berkeley or San Francisco, the community concert organizers would get in touch with the performers’ managers and ask if they could play in a smaller town, such as Walnut Creek where I heard concerts. That’s where I heard William Primrose, who was one of the first people ever to make a career as a solo violist. I remember being very excited about the concert, but I didn't think of it as being any different than the violin, because I'd never held a viola or even seen a viola”.

“But during my first year at the Conservatory, I was playing in an orchestra for the first time, and also doing chamber music, playing in a string quartet. I would listen to the viola part as we were playing, and I really liked the deeper, more mellow sound of the viola. During  breaks I would ask the viola player if I could try the instrument. And there was just something about that sound that clicked with me”.

John is tall – 6’2” – and his chamber music coach suggested that the viola might fit better with his height and his hands. So John started to take lessons with the viola, and he immediately felt at home with the instrument and has loved the sound of it ever since.

My next question was: Is there any music written particularly for the viola, or is it all transcribed from music for other instruments?

“Up until the end of the 19th century and even into the beginning of the 20th century, the viola wasn't considered to be a solo instrument”, John told me. “There were exceptions: Mozart wrote a Double Concerto for violin and viola, which is one of the first concertos for viola. And Berlioz, in the 19th century, wrote a symphony that has a large solo viola part. And then Brahms wrote two sonatas for clarinet later in his life, and then made a transcription for the viola”.

“But in the 20th century, a number of violinists started asking composers of their time to write music for the viola. This happened in many places around the world, it was one of those magical synchronicities. These people, just like me, loved the sound of the viola and wanted more music for its unique qualities.”

John continued: “Now there's lots of music for the viola, and that is because of one of those first musicians like Lionel Tertis in England who asked for more viola music and who was the teacher of my principal viola teacher, Philip Burton, and an inspiration to William Primrose with whom I took some lessons as a student in the Aspen Music Festival. They were all a part of that movement to create a solo contemporary repertoire for the viola. While in college, I was also introduced to playing all kinds of contemporary music that's in the classical genre. I was just open to everything. And so a large portion of my professional life has been spent playing the viola in music written in our time. Especially in my New York days, I played a lot of premiere pieces, not only for viola, but also for ensembles. And that was a big, fascinating portion of my career”.

When I had seen John perform, I had noticed that he sometimes used electronic devices and a computer. I asked him about this.

John explained: “A composer can write a score that is like a concerto for viola and orchestra, but the orchestra part is all the electronic sounds. That's one of the best ways to describe it. Or, instead of a viola and piano, you're playing viola and electronic sounds. So, those electronic sounds could be just one line of someone singing, or it could be sounding like an orchestra of electronic sounds, or like a bunch of percussion instruments. It's fascinating to work with electronics, and one of the best parts is that, if it's a complicated score of electronic sounds, I don't have to be asked by an orchestra to play it. I can rehearse it all by myself, I can make the electronic part stop and go. So it's been a wonderful experience for me”.

What is it like to switch from big concert halls to small chamber settings, from an audience of close to a thousand people to just fifty or seventy, I wanted to know.
 
“One of the things I've been enjoying with my house concerts is that I don't feel the audience here can be defined, or wants to be defined. I'm not interested in whether they go to every classical music concert in Santa Fe. At this point in my life I have been just enjoying this close contact with this audience”, John explained.
​
“People's first reaction after a concert is, ‘it's so wonderful to be up close’, because they are just a few feet away. They can hear the effort. They can hear the bow crossing the strings. They can hear the hammers of the piano. They are aware of the physical production of the music, they have a more immediate emotional response to music when they’re up close. This has been a very gratifying part of my career”.

​ He continued: “One of the interesting things about playing in different halls is in  sensing  the differences in dimensions. You feel them as being an extension of your instrument. And so when you're in a concert hall and the audience is out there in the hall, after a few minutes, you sense how they're hearing you:  your sound becomes the space that you and they are in”.
So, after years and years of traveling and performing all over the world, with big audiences, John performs now in a more intimate setting, which is more personable, more personal in a way. John agreed.

 “In this journey, music was the impetus and the reward. When you enter school, there’s a large apparatus that is providing your education. Then when you get into the profession, there are managers, contractors, concert presenters and colleagues involved in how and where you will perform, providing a world of discussion and business that's all around this personal thing of wanting to express music. You become involved  in a world of discussion and business, and that's all around this very personal thing of wanting to play music. It has seemed quite natural to retire some of those dimensions of a career hovering around this ‘personal thing’.”

​And then John told me a lovely anecdote.

“In the 70s, I played  in the first three summers of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and Georgia O'Keeffe let them use her images for their posters. They're gorgeous.”

“The gym that she built for the village was finished in one of those years, and she asked if some of the musicians could come up and play for the village to celebrate its opening. So three of us came up and played a Beethoven string trio. And afterwards she had us over to her house with our spouses for a reception. I remember going out to her backyard which overlooks the valley. I remembered that view so vividly. And then all these years later, when Cinda and I were talking about coming to New Mexico, I said, ‘What about Abiquiú?’”

I wonder if any of our Abiquiú readers might remember this performance from about fifty years ago? If so, please leave a comment!

“Cinda is a New Yorker, born and bred, she's a real urban woman. She isn't naturally given to ‘Let's go on a hike’ or anything like that. But this land and sky have become a real thing for both of us, it’s such a beautiful place in which to be”.

John continued: “We never thought about our home being a concert place until maybe the second year we were here. People had been so kind and helpful when we moved in so we thought that, in thanks, we would invite some people over and I would play some solo viola music”.
 
“Well, immediately we got some calls from other friends saying, ‘Oh, I hear you're giving a little concert in your house. Could we come?’ This is a small town, after all. So there were more and more people, but we did it. And then we thought, ‘Well, we could do this every year, just have our own concert here’, and that's what we started doing”.

In addition to the concerts at his home, John also performs occasionally in Santa Fe and Albuquerque  (watch the Abiquiú News for announcements). It’s not often that one gets the chance to listen to a world-famous performer who significantly contributed to the establishment of the viola as a solo instrument, inspiring a number of new compositions.
For a short taste, listen to John playing a traditional Irish tune at the 2009 Aspen Music Festival.

As we neared the end of our interview, John summarized his career:
“When you tell the story of your life, it sounds like you went from A to B to C to D, up the ladder to success. I felt so confined in the small town where I grew up, and those first years in San Francisco were explosive for me! When I look back on my career  I am amazed, the way it unfolded and developed. At each step it was like, ‘Oh, now I can stand, oh now I can walk’. You just learn how to do it”.​

“And now I’m just in a really great place – it has been wonderful to be out of some of the former constructs, to be me with my wonderful partner, daughter, grandson, and in this beautiful land and sky”.

Thank you, John, for sharing with me how and why you love your music and your instrument. What a wonderful, prodigious career and life you have.