Voting rights advocates praised the shift away from county-line ballots but warned provisions would maintain political parties’ outsized influence. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
Gov. Phil Murphy on Thursday signed legislation codifying New Jersey’s move to redesign its primary ballots, though some provisions of the new law have left voting and good government advocates dissatisfied.
The legislation, which the governor signed without comment, will require New Jersey’s county clerks to print ballots that group candidates by the office they are seeking. That would eliminate the controversial county-line system that saw ballots group disparate candidates who all received endorsements from county political parties.
“The bill definitely isn’t perfect. It can and should be better, but it is the best the ballot has been since the death of the county line,” said Nuzhat Chowdhury, director of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice’s democracy and justice program.
Though advocates have broadly praised the shift to office-block ballots, they warned that changes the Senate made to the bill — including the allowance of alphanumeric markers that party organizations use to campaign in places like Hudson County — risk undermining efforts to move toward a neutral ballot.
“We all urged him to conditionally veto this bill because frankly there are elements of this bill that put a thumb on the scale still,” Chowdhury said.
The bipartisan legislation also ends election for members of the Republican and Democratic state committees, who will now be selected by partisan county committee members.
The new law maintains candidates’ ability to bracket with each other and have their ballot positions determined by a single draw, rather than individually. It also bars candidates from using a slogan that includes the name of a candidate for a separate office — a move seen as targeting Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, a Democrat running for governor this year with a slate of Assembly candidates who will now not be able to use his name in their ballot slogans.
The changes to New Jersey ballots come nearly a year after U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi found New Jersey’s system of county-line ballots is likely unconstitutional and barred their use in last year’s Democratic primaries. That order, lodged in response to a suit filed by Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat, barred clerks from conducting ballot draws that “do not include a separate drawing for every office and candidate,” among other things.
When Kim and two then-congressional candidates filed their suit, they argued that county-line ballots offer an improper and insurmountable advantage for party-backed candidates by grouping them together and often banishing their rivals to distant spots on the ballot, often called “ballot Siberia.”
The new ballot rules take effect immediately, and clerks must conform to them when drafting ballots for primaries this June.
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