With Tammy out, clerks beg, ‘Please don’t take our county line away!’

Barely had the words “I am suspending my Senate campaign today” left first lady Tammy Murphy’s mouth on Sunday before New Jersey’s power brokers began trying to use her failed bid for the Senate to their advantage.

Murphy’s success in winning the county line in key counties has been the focus of a legal challenge by Rep. Andy Kim and others. Kim argued in federal court that the county line — which gives advantageous ballot placement to candidates backed by party bosses — is unconstitutional and should not be used for June’s primaries. A judge was set to decide as early as this week whether to issue a preliminary injunction barring clerks from using ballots with the county line.

But lawyers for county clerks who are defendants in the case raced to Judge Zahid Quraishi Monday to say, “Wait! Tammy quitting changes everything!”

The argument, laid out by attorney Mark Natale, defending the Burlington County clerk, is that if Kim is now going to be awarded the county line instead of Murphy in places like Essex and Hudson counties, he does not face irreparable harm, and therefore Quraishi can’t issue the preliminary injunction.

“Defendants, having built a factual record and legal defense that applies to a fundamentally different context than the current reality, are now prejudiced without the ability to supplement the record to fit this paradigm shift in the election,” Natale wrote.

This argument ignores the fact that Kim himself testified that even in counties where he won the county line instead of Murphy, the county line is not fair — it forces him to associate with candidates he may not want to because the county line groups them all together in one place on the ballot.

“As I mentioned, I don’t even know most of these candidates in, you know, these different counties across the state that are awarded these lines,” he said in court last week.

There’s also the matter of the other two plaintiffs, Sarah Schoengood and Carolyn Rush, who are seeking House seats and have made the same kinds of claims Kim has about the unfairness of the county line. Murphy abandoning her Senate bid changes nothing about their candidacies.

Perhaps the best argument made against the county line Monday is one that Quraishi likely won’t consider, though he should. Election law attorney Scott Salmon wrote on behalf of labor leader Patricia Campos-Medina, who is also seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate against Kim and activist Larry Hamm. Before Murphy quit the race, Campos-Medina joined Hamm and Kim in asking county clerks to use a different type of ballot in June, one that would not give any one of them an advantage.

The same harm Campos-Medina suffered from being forced to compete within the county-line system exists today, as it did before Murphy dropped out, Salmon wrote.

“And if a statute was unconstitutional yesterday, it is still unconstitutional today,” he added.