Judge’s ruling curbs election power of N.J. party bosses
A federal judge Friday ruled against the New Jersey primary ballot system that Rep. Andy Kim has claimed gives party bosses unfair power to tip the scales in favor of their hand-picked candidates.
Unless it is overturned, the ruling amounts to an earthquake in New Jersey politics, which has long been known for the dominance of party bosses.
District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi granted a preliminary injunction sought by Kim that orders Garden State county clerks to use an impartial ballot design for the looming primaries including the June 4 Democratic battle to fill the seat now held by scandal-tarred U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez.
“Defendants are required to use a … randomized ballot order system in which each candidate for each office has an equal chance of obtaining the first ballot position,” Quraishi wrote in a brief imposing the injunction.
The order bans for now the so-called “county line” system, which had allowed party leaders to group together their hand-picked candidates for all offices in the most prominent spot on the ballot, giving them an advantage over insurgent candidates.
Quraishi’s ruling would have been a blockbuster decision boosting Kim’s primary campaign against First Lady Tammy Murphy, who won the backing of many Democratic bosses in the most populous counties covering Jersey cities like Newark, Camden and Jersey City.
But Murphy, a lifelong Republican who switched parties after marrying Gov. Phil Murphy, abruptly pulled the plug on her sputtering campaign last weekend, leaving Kim as the overwhelming favorite even before the judge’s ruling.
Kim now faces opposition from two little-known Democratic rivals. Given New Jersey’s deep-blue lean, Kim is likely to become the first Korean-American U.S. senator in history.
Menendez says he may run as an independent but he is facing a federal trial on bribery and fraud charges and is considered unlikely to play any significant role in the election.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether New Jersey county clerks, many of whom are stalwarts of the state’s still-potent party machines, will appeal Quraishi’s ruling or seek a delay until after the primary.
The officials claimed in a recent court hearing before Quraishi that it would be difficult to rejigger ballots in time for the vote.
After the ruling, Jack Carbone, an attorney for the clerks, said the defendants were “evaluating their options for an appeal.”
The ruling is likely to make it much easier for insurgent candidates for all elective offices to mount successful challenges to establishment-backed candidates, particularly for districts in the state’s heavily Democratic counties of Essex, Hudson and Camden.
“This is a brand new day in New Jersey, one where the people, not political machines, decide the best candidate to carry the banner for their party,” said Ezra Levin of Indivisible, a progressive group that opposed the county line.
Regardless of his own race, Kim, a self-styled suburban good-government liberal, has vowed to pursue the case to outlaw the county line system in New Jersey, which is the only state that uses such a system.
He cheered the decision as the dawn of a new era of fairer primary elections in the state, where the Democratic machine in particular has been the stuff of political legend for decades.
“It’s a victory built from the incredible work of grassroots activists around our state,” Kim said. They “saw an undemocratic system marginalizing the voices of voters and worked tirelessly to change it.”