New Mexico’s secretary of state, Dianna Duran, resigned Thursday as part of a plea deal to avoid jail time for embezzling campaign funds to pay gambling debts. While Duran pleaded guilty to 4 felony and 2 misdemeanor counts involving $14,000 of campaign funds, she was originally charged with 65 counts and accused of taking $430,000. Read the story here and here.
In 2010, Duran became the first Republican elected to that office since 1928. Before that, she was a state senator. During her brief tenure, she stirred controversy with her efforts to scrub voter rolls. Read that story here.
In recent years, voter suppression has become a major GOP strategy across the country, as one Republican-controlled state legislature after another has passed voter ID laws and Republican officials who control election processes have purged voter rolls and taken other steps to make it harder for minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies to vote.
Photo: Duran with her lawyer