10:31
Commentary
Protestors gather outside the federal courthouse in Trenton on March 18, 2024, in advance of a court hearing to examine the constitutionality of the county line. (Photo by New Jersey Monitor)
I was hoping for a knockout punch during Monday’s court hearing in Rep. Andy Kim’s push to abolish the county line.
Alas, both sides made some good arguments, so it’s still a mystery which way U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi will decide as he mulls whether county-line ballots are an unconstitutional affront to democracy, as Kim argues. Though I think Quraishi’s courtroom comments indicate he’s at least a smidge sympathetic with Kim’s arguments.
For the uninitiated
The county line represents the unique way most New Jersey counties set up their primary ballots, with all the candidates who receive the endorsement of county party leaders grouped together in one column or row. You can see how this looks here:
You see how there is one group of Democrats neatly aligned under President Biden’s name? That’s the county line. And those candidates floating elsewhere on the ballot like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Larry Hamm, and others? We call that running off the line.
Kim is arguing that setting up the ballot this way is bad, echoing progressive critics who have long argued that the county line communicates to a voter that candidates running on the line are legit while those running off the line are not.
New Jersey is the only state where ballots look like this. This sample ballot from the Kentucky GOP primary is how an office-block ballot looks:
See how all the presidential candidates are in one block and all the Senate candidates are in another one? That’s how Kim wants our ballots to look, and he’s suing to make it happen in time for the June primary. His chief rival, first lady Tammy Murphy, will have the county line in a number of key Democratic counties, giving her a big — Kim says unconstitutional — advantage over Kim.
The state’s county clerks came armed Monday with a bevy of attorneys, so many that some had to sit in the jury box for most of the hearing. They argued that there simply is not enough time between now and the June 4 primary to revamp how they lay out their ballots. They noted repeatedly that there are deadlines fast approaching, like April 20, when they must send out ballots to overseas and military voters.
“It is not feasible. It cannot be done,” said one of their attorneys, Angelo Genova.
Attorneys for Kim’s side had a witness, elections technology expert Ryan Macias, who testified that the two companies that run New Jersey’s voting machines don’t have to do anything special to transform how our ballot looks before June, and that clerks will mostly have to do the same work they do now.
“This is just the normal course of business,” Macias said. “In every single election, you are going to have to redesign a ballot, even if you are starting with a template. The template is not going to be the same as the previous election.”
There was a revealing exchange between one of the attorneys on Kim’s side, Flavio Komuves, and witness David Passante. Passante runs Royal Printing Service, which prints ballots for about half the state’s counties, and Passante predicted there would be “chaos” if Quraishi orders office-block ballots for June’s primary.
There’s a lot of silliness here because clerks routinely use office-block style ballots already for nonpartisan local elections — they’re just usually tucked away on a different part of the ballot. Expanding that kind of style to the entire ballot would result in chaos?
Komuves had Passante look at a few ballots he’s printed for past elections, and noted that every single one had a school board race included on the ballot in office-block style. Komuves’ point was Passante can already lay out ballots in that style.
“School board race is a totally different election,” Passante said.
“But it’s held on the same day, right? Same jurisdiction, same voters? Same in all respects?” Komuves asked him.
“Correct,” Passante conceded.
Quraishi’s occasional interrogation of the pro-county line lawyers also proved revealing. When Bill Tambussi, who represents Camden County Democrats, argued that political parties have a right to associate with their preferred candidates, the judge jumped in.
“Why can’t they just go out there and say, this is our candidate?” he asked. “Why does it have to be that they also control the ballot?”
A great question, and one Tambussi had no good answer for. Camden County, remember, is where party leaders gave Murphy the line over the weekend at a meeting where they would not allow Kim to attend and where they had body men literally standing in a doorway to keep another candidate, Patricia Campos Medina, from entering.
Better still was when Quraishi asked Passante about his claim that chaos would erupt if the judge barred clerks from using county-line ballots in June. Quraishi asked what Passante would do if one of his county clerk clients asked him to produce a ballot without a county line.
“Would you find a way to do it?” Quraishi asked.
“Yes,” Passante said.
Quraishi noted the difference.
“If I order it, it’s chaos. If the county clerk asks him, he finds a way to get it done,” he said.
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Terrence T. McDonald