When Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) filed his lawsuit earlier this year asking a judge to strike down the county line, the unique New Jersey primary ballot design system that favors party-endorsed candidates, it was the state’s county clerks who were named as defendants. When the case was heard in federal court, it was county clerks and their lawyers who were tasked with defending the system.
And when Judge Zahid Quraishi issued his momentous decision striking down the line – for this year only, and on the Democratic side only – it was county clerks who had to figure out how to put an entirely new ballot design system in place with just a few months to go until the primary election.
Now that the primary has come and gone, the New Jersey Globe spoke to four county clerks – Monmouth County’s Christine Giordano Hanlon, Hudson County’s Junior Maldonado, Hunterdon County’s Mary Melfi, and Mercer County’s Paula Sollami Covello – about their offices’ experiences in an unprecedented election year.
All four said that, in the end, their offices were able to make things work and deliver a primary election that went about as smoothly as in any other year; as Maldonado put it, “we were given a surprise pop quiz, and we passed it with flying colors.” But they also didn’t hesitate to bring up the challenges they faced, from wrangling with their voting machine vendors to conducting extended ballot draws to educating voters about their new ballots.
As the fight over New Jersey’s ballot design continues in court and potentially the state legislature, county clerks will remain on the front lines, since they’ll be the ones who have to implement any changes that are made. Melfi had a simple request for the judges and politicians who will be making those sorts of changes: please talk to us first.
“I don’t care what they do in the future, as long as they do it with plenty of time for us to work it out,” she said. “My position is I’m not here to make policy, but I am here to implement it. Please don’t ignore me on implementation.”
‘The fear of the unknown’
The arguments made by Kim, who is now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, about why the county line should be abolished were lofty ones: that it disenfranchised voters, hobbled off-the-line candidates, and forced politicians into unconstitutional associations with one another. Office-block ballots, where candidates are grouped by the position they’re running for rather than based on party endorsements, would resolve those problems, he argued.
The 19 county clerks who defended the line in court largely steered away from those high-minded debates. Instead, they focused on the logistical issues that would result from a last-minute change in ballot design, saying that a ruling coming in March affecting June primary ballots would create chaos in their offices and among their voting machine and printing vendors.
Hanlon, in fact, was one of the witnesses called up during the March 18 hearing to testify on her belief that it was too late in the cycle to make such a radical change. She told the New Jersey Globe that, at the time, Elections Systems & Software – or ES&S, the voting machine company used in many New Jersey counties – was sending out alarming signals about their ability to cope with a change in ballot design.
“One of the big issues that we ran into, as we were getting [to the] hearing, was that ES&S was telling the counties who had this type of system, ‘We can’t do this in time for the primary,’” Hanlon said. “So we were basing our understanding of things on that.”
Once the ruling arrived striking down the line on March 29, however, that was that; most of the clerks were initially part of an appeal, but they all dropped out when it became clear that the appellate court’s schedule would be too slow to fit within the tight timeframe of primary deadlines. (The appeal went on ahead with several county party organizations as appellants instead, and was ultimately unsuccessful.)
From there, county clerks had a very short window of time to prepare ballots, get the printers and voting machine companies on board, and conduct ballot draws before the deadline to begin sending out mail-in ballots on April 20. Complicating matters further was the fact that Quraishi’s order only applied to Democrats, meaning that the clerks had to still prepare party-line style ballots on the Republican side. (Two clerks, in Burlington and Atlantic Counties, decided that was too big of a lift and ditched the Republican line, too.)
Melfi said that, regardless of the merits of the decision, it was based on a flawed understanding of how clerk’s offices work and how ballots are laid out.
“Nobody truly understands the workflow of what we do,” Melfi said. “The judge said on the record, ‘You just change the names around!’ And that’s not how the ballot is designed. It truly takes me a good healthy four to five weeks of getting that ballot ready. I’m talking about proofing it, setting it, and so on.”
“There was the fear of the unknown,” she added.
Technical difficulties
In theory, switching to office-block ballots – the style of primary ballot used essentially everywhere in the country save for New Jersey – shouldn’t have been too much of a problem for the clerks and the vendors they worked with. At least, that was the argument put forward by Kim in his lawsuit and promoted by Quraishi in his decision.
But Maldonado, Melfi, and Hanlon all said that ES&S, which their counties contract with for voting machines, turned out to have a major problem with the new style, resulting in lots of overtime work and sleepless nights over whether it could get done.
“It was a challenge, because we didn’t get notification from ES&S until the 24th hour that they could make the change over to the office-block style,” Maldonado said. “For me, that was interesting, because they have their machines in, like, 45 states, and all the other states do office-block style. So it was a little curious to me why they wouldn’t have been able to manage it in New Jersey.”
In Monmouth County, Hanlon said, a seemingly minor issue related to write-in votes in multi-candidate races led to massive difficulties designing mail-in ballots; “the printer was working around the clock, my staff was putting in 16-hour days,” she said. The issue was ultimately resolved, but some ballots looked a little strange as a result, and Hanlon said she hoped this year’s experience will make ES&S better prepared in the future.
Mercer County, on the other hand, uses Dominion voting machines, and Covello said she had minimal problems getting her vendors to figure out a new ballot layout.
“We went right to work [after the judge’s order],” Covello said. “We worked with our printer and we worked with Dominion, and we were able to come up with a design that I thought worked out really well… They all have familiarity with the no-line ballot, both of our vendors, so they were able to do it.”
But that didn’t mean there weren’t other issues associated with the ballot change. Because the change required extra work both in the clerk’s office and on the part of the vendors, the judge’s order ended up costing the county extra money compared to previous years’ primaries, Covello said.
There was also the problem of the ballot draw. Quraishi’s order specifically stated that the process to determine the order of candidates on the ballot must include “a separate drawing for every office and candidate,” and he didn’t provide any exceptions for uncontested races. That meant that any Democratic primary where multiple seats were up in the same district, such as for town council or county committee, required a separate drawing even if the race wasn’t contested – resulting in hundreds of individual drawings in some counties.
“In Hunterdon, I had Democratic county committee up, which is 117 districts,” Melfi said. “He said, ‘You shall draw for every position.’ If you and I filed a joint petition – you’re first, I’m second, nobody’s running against us – I still drew that, because that’s what the order said.”
“You literally have to write every name on a card, separately, put them in a box, and shake the box,” Hanlon said. “It’s ridiculous. So I had people working overtime to get that done. Very time-consuming and tedious.”
Voter education
All four county clerks emphasized that just designing the ballot is only part of their job; they also have to ensure that voters can understand the ballots they’re voting on. And since most of the state’s Democratic voters were accustomed to voting on party-line ballots, the clerks said they made substantial efforts to make sure voters knew that this year would be different.
“We did a lot for voter education,” Hanlon said. “Hopefully that helped people. I put a note on every ballot: ‘Please read carefully, this is different than in past years.’ I sent a postcard to every primary Democratic voter with the old ballot and the new ballot, and did a lot of social and press releases. Hopefully that helped. We didn’t have people calling and complaining.”
Maldonado, though, said that his office did field some calls from frustrated Hudson County residents: “We got some complaints from voters – ‘it’s a different style, we didn’t know about it.’ But we did the best we could [to educate voters].”
Covello noted that the fact that ballots were different on the Democratic side versus the Republican side added unnecessary confusion for voters of both parties.
“That was the question we got – why is one laid out this way, and the other laid out that way?” Covello said. “People were just confused. It really did not make sense to have two different ballot layouts in the same primary.”
What comes next?
If office-block ballots are here to stay in New Jersey, then voters will likely grow eventually accustomed to them, aided by further outreach efforts from clerk’s offices. But the problem right now is that no one knows for sure what the future of New Jersey ballots will look like, since a longer-term case about the constitutionality of the line is still in progress.
Most New Jersey politicos expect that, in the end, the line will be permanently struck down; if the broader case isn’t resolved by next year’s primary, another preliminary injunction could block the use of the line on a temporary basis once again. State legislative leaders have also promised to take a look at ballot design reforms, though what they might be is anyone’s guess.
The four county clerks told the New Jersey Globe that whatever ultimately happens, they hope the legislature will talk with them about what’s possible and what will make their jobs easier.
“It would be great to have some legislative action,” Covello said. “We would love some clarifications. I would love to see the legislature act and basically create some operating procedures for us that are clear.”
The legislature could, for example, modernize the ballot drawing process and make it clear that drawings don’t have to happen for uncontested offices; another point of discussion is grouping statutes, which allows allied candidates running for the same office to be grouped with one another. (This year, members of joint slates for local and county offices were often scattered across the ballot, making it harder to figure out who was running with whom.)
Maldonado – who, it should be noted, is allied with anti-line Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop and who was one of the first clerks to withdraw from the appeal of Quraishi’s decision – went further. He said that since it’s likely the line will be struck down regardless, it would make sense for the legislature to do so themselves, without the need for further litigation.
“I anticipate that we’re going to go with the office-block style for all future elections. I think that’s going to be the outcome of whatever lawsuit is still pending,” Maldonado said. “If the legislature can just put that into legislation that makes it easier for the clerks to be able to follow, I think that would be helpful.”
The clerks themselves are partisan elected officials; when Maldonado, Covello, Hanlon, and Melfi were last re-elected, they all did so running on the county line. But they emphasized that their stake in the matter is not personal or political – it’s procedural.
“I don’t know that there’s too many clerks that would argue one way or the other [about the line], because we’re not partisan in our decision-making,” Maldonado said.
And whatever happens next in the fight over the line, they said their main interest is in making sure the election runs smoothly, and that judges, politicians, and voters understand what needs to be done to make that happen.
“We don’t care what they do, just let us know what you want to do and let us tell you if it can be done,” Melfi said.