Some words which haven’t seen a lot of usage are running loose and rampant these days, some of them curse words and others powerful old pieces of vocabulary that mean so much to the fabric of this republic and yet receive little to no attention.
One of the words with recent debate in Cibola is sometimes looked upon as a dirty word.
Representation.
Lately, I’ve had people in Cibola County look me in the eye and say, “Why even vote if they can just do whatever they want?” And every time I hear it, some of the patriotism inside me drops. Because, when everyday Americans begin to question whether their vote has meaning, we stop debating policy and instead find ourselves confronting a crisis of legitimacy.
Representation is not a suggestion. It is not a courtesy. It is the core operating system of this American project we are blessed to be part of.
Representation is the promise that the people who make decisions about your roads, your taxes, your safety, your schools, and your freedom are the people you chose, and people who live among you. City councilors, village trustees, county commissioners, legislators, congressmembers – every single one of them holds authority only because the public grants it.
And yet, here in New Mexico, and unfortunately here in Cibola County, too, we have allowed something corrosive to creep into our system.
We have allowed the idea of “residency” to become flexible. Optional. Something that can be shifted on a form instead of lived in daily life.
And it is slowly breaking the chain of consent between the people and their government.
This is not just a Cibola County issue, it is a statewide problem. New Mexico has elected officials serving districts they do not truly live in.
We have candidates changing their voter registration mere months before filing for office. We have a legal structure that treats “intent” as more important than “presence.” And we have voters watching this unfold and wondering whether their voice matters at all.
The Founders of this great nation would be horrified.
Colonial America did not revolt against British rule because of a tea tax. They revolted because Parliament insisted they were “virtually represented” by people in London, people who did not live in the colonies, did not share their struggles, and did not answer to them.
The colonists rejected that with everything they had.
To them, representation had to be local.
It had to be chosen. It had to be accountable.
It had to be lived.
James Otis warned in 1764 that taxing people who are not represented violates “the first principles of civil freedom.”
John Adams wrote that no free government can exist without a representative legislature elected by the people. Samuel Adams called a government without representation nothing short of tyranny. Jefferson wrote that no man can be taxed without his own consent, and consent is meaningless without representation.
For our Founders, this was not a policy dispute.
Representation was not a technical question. It was the entire justification for the existence of a new nation. Without real representation, government ceased to be government and became a domination of one class of people by another.
And now, two and a half centuries later, we find ourselves allowing a system where a person may be elected to represent a district they only moved into a few months ago, or worse that they may not genuinely live in at all.
New Mexico’s legal definition of residency is built around “intent” and the term “domicile,” terminology which may make sense for inheritance disputes or tuition cases. But it does not reflect the spirit of democratic representation this nation was created on. New Mexico’s lax rules allow someone to simply declare they “intend” for a place to be their home. But our Founders would have laughed at the idea that intent alone could substitute for actual, daily, lived connection to a community.
Intent does not fill potholes.
Intent does not answer constituent calls.
Intent does not see what a neighborhood sees, or live what a community lives.
Only presence can do that.
When New Mexico’s system allows someone to claim residency without genuinely living in the district they serve, it breaks the chain of consent.
It tells the people that their voice matters less than a paper form. It tells children learning about democracy that the rules are optional. And it tells the world that America, the nation that once fought an empire over this very principle, no longer practices what it preaches.
This is not acceptable.
Not in New Mexico. Not in Cibola County. Not in the United States of America.
We are blessed to live in a country that has given more freedom to more people than any other place on earth. A country that bends the arc of history toward justice, even when it stumbles. A country built on the idea that the governed, not the government, hold the power.
New Mexico must reform its residency laws to match the standards our democracy demands. That means requiring candidates to live in the districts they want to represent – not just change their voter registration weeks before filing. The law should define “residency” as continuous physical presence for at least 12 months before an election, and candidates should provide evidence – leases, utility bills, school enrollment, whatever it takes – to prove it.
The people of this state deserve more than paper representation. They deserve neighbors who know their streets, walk their sidewalks, and stand in the same grocery lines. That is the America I love.
That is the America I believe in.
And it is our responsibility – yours and mine – to keep it.