By Wheeler Cowperthwaite
Special to the SUN

Who is Alejandrino Manuel Naranjo?

That’s the question Rio Arriba County Commissioner Alex Naranjo wanted to avoid in the lead-up to the November election, as he runs for re-election to the District 2 County Commission seat.

Naranjo successfully petitioned the district court to have the Rio Arriba County Clerk’s office print his name as “Alex M. Naranjo” on the primary and general election ballots, after it was set to appear as the name on his birth certificate, Alejandrino Manuel Naranjo.

Naranjo filed the petition on March 18 and District Judge T. Glenn Ellington granted it on March 24, after Rio Arriba County Clerk Sarah Archuleta did not oppose the change.

The deadline to make changes was April 3.

Naranjo’s attorney, Daniel Ivey-Soto, wrote in the petition that when the Motor Vehicle Division issued Naranjo a Real ID-compliant driver’s license in July 2025, they changed the name on his license to the one on his birth certificate, Alejandrino Manuel Naranjo, “a name Petition has never used in the community.”

His old license had “Alex M. Naranjo,” but the Real ID licenses require the name on a license to correspond with a “source document,” Ivey-Soto wrote.

The Division automatically sent the new name to the secretary of state, who forwarded to the Rio Arriba County clerk with instructions to “process a new voter registration form,” he wrote.

All this happened unbeknownst to Naranjo.

That new voter registration form meant that his name on the primary and general election ballots would have been printed as Alejandrino Manuel Naranjo, not “Alex M. Naranjo” as he has run for various positions for years, starting in 1989 with the Española School Board.

In English, Alejandrino is Alex, the name he has gone by his entire life, including in elections dating back decades, Naranjo said in an interview.

“So the judge agreed with me,” he said.

Getting a name changed on a ballot is nothing new, Ivey-Soto wrote, citing the 2008 and 2010 cases by then-congressional candidate Michelle Lujan Grisham, who wanted Lujan added to her name on the ballot, instead of just appearing as “Michelle Grisham,” Ivey-Soto wrote.

As evidence, Ivey-Soto included records from multitudes of past elections and applications where Naranjo lists his first name as Alex and his middle initial as M., compared to the automatically-generated voter registration form calling him “Alejandrino”

“Petitioner’s name shall be shown on the 2026 ballots as: Alex M. Naranjo,” Ellington wrote in his order.