Why everyone in New Jersey politics is talking about “the line.”
New Jersey election ballots have long been designed to benefit the favored candidates of local political leaders. But now, in the midst of a high-stakes Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, a move to declare the ballot measure unconstitutional could upend the state’s entire electoral system.
In the current ballot design, the candidates officially supported by the leaders of the local Democratic and Republican parties are listed in a single column or row in a prominent list. position known as ‘the line’.
The challengers’ names appear on the side, sometimes at the edge of the ballot. Candidates call this ‘vote Siberia’.
Research has shown that candidates whose names appear on ‘the line’ generally win. The province’s political leaders use the system to encourage loyalty. As a result, party leaders have excessive control over policy decisions, jobs and government contracts.
In 2020, a lawsuit was filed to challenge the system. But it wasn’t until last month — when Andy Kim, a Democratic congressman from South Jersey who is vying for a Senate seat now occupied by Robert Menendez, filed his own legal challenge to the practice — that the long smoldering issue caught fire.
Mr. Kim is asking a federal judge, Zahid N. Quraishi of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, to force the state to redesign the ballot before the June 4 primary.
The judge held a daylong hearing Monday in Trenton, NJ.
Tammy Murphy, the first lady of New Jersey and Kim’s main opponent in the primaries, has the most to lose if Judge Quraishi grants Kim’s request.
Mrs. Murphy’s path to victory depends heavily on the institutional support she has received from Democratic leaders in the state’s most populous, urban counties, who are close to her husband, Gov. Philip Murphy. The livelihoods of many party officials who support Ms. Murphy depend on the state government, making it difficult to know where their support for her ends and where self-preservation begins.
Hours before the hearing, the state’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, who has long been a close political ally of the governor, weighed in. He declared “the line” unconstitutional in a letter to Judge Quraishi on Sunday, a major blow to the government. Mrs. Murphy.
This is why leaders in New Jersey and Washington are paying so much attention to the debate.
‘Unconstitutional’?
Precinct leaders’ preferred candidates for each office — including president, congress, mayor, sheriff, county commissioner and county clerk — are all listed in brackets in a single column or row on most New Jersey primary ballots. Candidates whose names appear on “the line” typically win, making it extremely difficult for unendorsed insurgents to break into politics.
This is not done this way in the 49 other states. And in his letter on Sunday, Mr. Platkin wrote that New Jersey’s system was unsustainable.
“The Attorney General has concluded that the challenged statutes are unconstitutional and therefore will not defend them,” he wrote.
Mr. Platkin was appointed attorney general by the governor after running Mr. Murphy’s first campaign and serving for several years as his top government lawyer.
Murphy’s chief spokesperson, Mahen Gunaratna, quickly fired back, noting that “attorneys general have a general obligation to defend the constitutionality of laws, regardless of their own personal views.”
During Monday’s hearing, Angelo J. Genova, a lawyer and elder statesman for the state Democratic Party who led the defense of the ballot design practice in court on Monday, called Mr. Platkin’s letter a “litigation grenade.”
Judge Quraishi seemed equally displeased.
“He’s giving his opinion from the cheap seats,” Judge Quraishi said, adding, “on a Sunday,” and, emphatically, “on St. Patrick’s Day.”
The hearing
Judge Quraishi set a deadline for legal responses on Monday at 1 p.m., and is expected to rule sometime afterward on whether to order New Jersey’s county clerks to cease using “the line” in favor of grouping candidates running for each office. ballots in a so-called office building or bubble ballot.
His fourth-floor courtroom was filled beyond capacity Monday with dozens of the state’s most influential lawyers, law clerks, news reporters, students who believed they were watching history unfold, and their professors who had canceled classes to attend the hearing. to live.
For more than nine hours, the judge heard testimony from a series of witnesses, including voting machine software experts, the owner of a ballot printing company and Mr. Kim’s campaign manager.
Mr. Kim himself spent more than an hour in the witness box.
Many of the questions posed to Mr. Kim, who was close in each of his three races for Congress, focused on when he decided to file the request for preliminary injunction and why.
“You can pursue reforms to a system and still have to work within it,” he said when asked why he had continued to pursue the same benefits that he now claims are unconstitutional.
Kim vs. Murphy
Nineteen of New Jersey’s 21 counties use a county-line ballot.
Mr. Kim has won the Democratic nomination nine provinces where delegates were allowed to vote anonymously at party conventions; Ms. Murphy won the nomination in seven counties where the Democratic Party chair largely controlled the decision, and in one county where the chair campaigned for her and endorsed her but allowed delegates to vote using secret ballots.
However, there are significantly more registered Democrats in the counties that support Ms. Murphy and where her name will appear in the first voting spot, just below President Biden’s.
Ms. Murphy said through a spokeswoman that she would follow whatever guidelines the federal court sets. “If it is up to the provincial parties,” she said, “I will complete those conferences and displays. Or, if the judge determines a different path, I will follow those rules too.”
Mr. Kim emphasized in his testimony that the ballot design gave voters an inaccurate impression that all candidates on “the line” were campaigning together or holding similar policy positions.
“All I’m asking for is a fair vote,” he said, adding, “All I’m asking is for New Jersey to be on par with 49 other states.”
‘Chaos’ or simple reprogramming?
The clock is ticking.
County clerks must begin sending mail-in ballots on April 20, and several witnesses testified Monday about the feasibility of changing the design of the ballots by then.
Two experts on voting machine software and machines, called to testify by Mr. Kim’s lawyers, indicated that it would not be difficult to use a new template and change the voting design. The types of machines and voting registration software used in New Jersey already support office block voting in other parts of the country, they noted.
Monmouth County Clerk-elect Christine Hanlon, a Republican, warned that this was “uncharted territory.”
“It would be a major concern if we could do this in the very short time frame that we could,” she testified.
Dave Passante, owner of a company that gets paid about $6 million a year to print ballots for 11 counties, predicted that implementing the changes would be “chaos.”
However, Judge Quraishi asked him if he could make it happen if a district secretary asked for it.
“What do you say to your client?” the judge asked.
“Yes,” said Mr. Passante.