New Jersey election ballots have long been designed to benefit the favored candidates of local political leaders. But now, in the middle of a high-stakes Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, a move to declare the ballot design unconstitutional could upend the state’s entire electoral system.
In the current ballot design, the candidates officially endorsed by the leaders of the local Democratic and Republican parties are listed in a single column or row in a prominent position known as “the line.”
The names of challengers appear off to the side, sometimes at the ballot’s edge. Candidates call this “ballot Siberia.”
Studies have shown that candidates whose names appear on “the line” generally win. County political leaders use the system to encourage fealty. As a result, party leaders have outsize control over policy decisions, jobs and government contracts.
A lawsuit challenging the system was filed in 2020. But it was not until last month — when Andy Kim, a Democratic congressman from South Jersey who is competing for a Senate seat now held by Robert Menendez, filed his own legal challenge to the practice — that the long-smoldering issue caught fire.
Mr. Kim is asking a federal judge, Zahid N. Quraishi of U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, to force the state to redesign the ballot before the June 4 primary.
The judge held a daylong hearing in Trenton, N.J., on Monday.
Tammy Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady and Mr. Kim’s main opponent in the primary, has the most to lose if Judge Quraishi grants Mr. Kim’s request.
Ms. Murphy’s path to victory is heavily dependent on the institutional support she has amassed from Democratic leaders in the state’s most populous, urban counties who are close to her husband, Gov. Philip Murphy. The livelihoods of many party officials backing Ms. Murphy are dependent on state government, making it difficult to know where their support for her ends and self-preservation begins.
Hours before the hearing, the state’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, who has long been a close political ally of the governor, weighed in. He declared “the line” unconstitutional in a letter to Judge Quraishi on Sunday, a major blow to Ms. Murphy.
Here’s why leaders in New Jersey, and in Washington, are paying so much attention to the debate.
‘Unconstitutional’?
County leaders’ preferred candidates for every office — including president, Congress, mayor, sheriff, county commissioner and county clerk — are all bracketed in a single column or row on most New Jersey primary ballots. Candidates whose names appear on “the line” typically win, making it extremely difficult for unendorsed insurgents to break into politics.
It’s not done this way in the 49 other states. And in his letter on Sunday, Mr. Platkin wrote that the New Jersey system was insupportable.
“The attorney general has concluded that the challenged statutes are unconstitutional and therefore will not be defending them,” he wrote.
Mr. Platkin was nominated for attorney general by the governor after helping to lead Mr. Murphy’s first campaign and working for several years as his top government lawyer.
Mr. Murphy’s chief spokesman, Mahen Gunaratna, quickly fired back, noting that “attorneys general have a general obligation to defend the constitutionality of statutes, regardless of their own personal views.”
During Monday’s hearing, Angelo J. Genova, a lawyer and elder statesman in the state’s Democratic Party who led Monday’s courtroom defense of the ballot-design practice, called Mr. Platkin’s letter a “litigation grenade.”
Judge Quraishi appeared equally displeased.
“He’s lobbing his opinion from the cheap seats,” Judge Quraishi said, adding, “on a Sunday,” and, for emphasis, “on St. Patrick’s Day.”
The hearing
Judge Quraishi set a deadline of Monday at 1 p.m. for legal responses, and he is expected to rule sometime after that on whether to order New Jersey’s county clerks to abandon use of “the line” in favor of grouping candidates running for each office together on ballots in what is known as an office block or bubble-style ballot.
His fourth-floor courtroom on Monday was filled beyond capacity with dozens of the state’s most influential lawyers, county clerks, news reporters, college students who believed they were watching history unfold, and their professors who had canceled class to attend the hearing.
For more than nine hours, the judge heard testimony from a series of witnesses, including experts in voting machine software, the owner of a company that prints ballots and Mr. Kim’s campaign manager.
Mr. Kim himself spent more than an hour on the witness stand.
Many of the questions asked of Mr. Kim, who has run on “the line” in each of his three races for Congress, centered on when he decided to file the request for injunctive relief, and why.
“One can seek reforms to a system while still having to work within it,” he said when asked why he had continued to seek the same advantages that he now argues are unconstitutional.
Kim versus Murphy
Nineteen of New Jersey’s 21 counties use a county-line ballot format.
Mr. Kim has won the Democratic nomination in nine counties where delegates at party conventions were permitted to cast ballots anonymously; Ms. Murphy has won the nomination in seven counties where the Democratic Party chair largely controlled the decision and in one county where the chairman campaigned for and endorsed her, but permitted delegates to vote using secret ballots.
There are, however, significantly more registered Democrats in the counties that are backing Ms. Murphy and where her name will appear in the lead ballot spot, just below President Biden’s.
Ms. Murphy said through a spokeswoman that she would follow whatever guidelines the federal court establishes. “If it remains up to the county parties,” she said, “I will complete those conventions and screenings. Or, should the courts determine a different path, I will follow those rules as well.”
Mr. Kim, in his testimony, stressed that the ballot design gave voters an inaccurate impression that all the candidates on “the line” were campaigning together or held similar policy positions.
“I just ask for us to have a fair ballot,” he said, adding, “All I’m asking is for New Jersey to be in line with 49 other states.”
‘Chaos’ or simple reprogramming?
The clock is ticking.
County clerks are required to begin sending out mail ballots on April 20, and several witnesses testified Monday about the feasibility of altering the ballot design by then.
Two experts on voting-machine software and machines, called to testify by Mr. Kim’s lawyers, indicated that it would not be hard to use a new template and alter the ballot design. The types of machines and vote-tabulating software used in New Jersey already support office block ballots in other parts of the country, they noted.
Monmouth County’s elected clerk, Christine Hanlon, a Republican, warned that it was “uncharted territory.”
“This would be of grave concern to be able to get this done in the very short time frame that we’d have,” she testified.
Dave Passante, an owner of a company that is paid roughly $6 million annually to print ballots for 11 counties, predicted that making the changes would be “chaos.”
He was pressed, however, by Judge Quraishi on whether he could get it done if a county clerk asked.
“What do you tell your client?” the judge asked.
“Yes,” Mr. Passante said.
