Election officials urged legislators to move cautiously on a new primary ballot design to ensure vendors could accommodate changes and to allow for voter education. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
County clerks told a special legislative panel Tuesday that state election infrastructure could support a redesign of primary ballots, adding some issues encountered in June’s primaries could be resolved by uniform balloting rules for both parties.
Election officials told the Assembly’s select committee on ballot design that existing election infrastructure, like voting machines, could accommodate a shift to new ballots, but urged legislators to move cautiously to ensure vendors could accommodate changes and to allow for voter education.
Essex County Clerk Chris Durkin said June’s shift from grid ballots with a county line — a design that groups party-backed candidates on the ballot — to office-block ballots, which group candidates instead by office sought, was “pretty seamless.”
“Now, you’re going to get concerns or people who are questioning the change and the method, but overall, I think it was a good experience and positive,” Durkin said.
The panel’s hearing, the first in a series, comes months after U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi in March barred the use of county-line ballots in June’s Democratic primaries. Quraishi ruled in favor of a group of candidates, including Rep. Andy Kim (D-03), who had filed a complaint arguing that the county line gives certain candidates an unconstitutional advantage on primary ballots.
Most officials who testified Tuesday told the select committee Quraishi’s order caused them some distress, most often because the order applied only to Democratic races, even if they identified few voting issues as a result of the redesigned ballots.
Clerks in counties that use Election Systems & Software voting machines said they came close to running two separate elections because of tabulating issues, but the vendor issued an imperfect solution.
“At the last minute, the programmer from ES&S figured out a way to make it work, but it was somehow a workaround with write-ins off to the side. It didn’t look right,” said Cape May County Clerk Rita Rothberg. “There was really very little voter education that could be done because we were up to the minute.”
Assemblyman Benjie Wimberly (D-Passaic), the panel’s Democratic co-chair, said election vendors would be called to testify at the panel’s next hearing, which has yet to be scheduled. The committee intends to take public testimony at a later hearing.
The differing designs caused some confusion even in counties where election infrastructure readily accommodated competing ballot designs.
Hunterdon County Clerk Mary Melfi told the panel that while her county’s machines could issue different types of ballots without problems, the competing designs still spurred mistrust among some residents of both parties.
“Election officials are under a lot of stress lately because of trust issues. People don’t trust us and they think something was going on,” she said. “Both sides thought we were messing around with them with the different ballots, but we did get it done. It was really stressful, and I’m glad it happened last year and not this year.”
Officials urged the Legislature to move slowly and provide them ample time to inform voters of changes to election law, warning the electorate was still learning about a series of changes enacted in recent years, like early in-person voting and new timelines for sample ballots, among numerous others.
Voters unfamiliar with new ballot designs were likelier to have portions of their ballot uncounted, some witnesses said.
“Voter education is a huge issue,” said Passaic County Superintendent of Elections Shona Mack-Pollock, adding, “We in Passaic County saw a lot of undervotes on the machines, and on the vote-by-mail and provisional ballots, we saw a lot of overvotes, so a lot of voters were disenfranchised.”