The ballot draw is coming up on Thursday, April 4, at 3 PM in all 21 New Jersey counties, but a federal judge’s ruling last week mandating office block voting will likely cause ballot drawings to last for hours—and maybe even days.
That’s because office block ballots will require an individual draw for every race, even when a group of candidates are unopposed for two or more seats.
Here’s an example: in Livingston, Democratic incumbents Michael Vieira and Al Anthony, are unopposed for two seats on the township council. In past elections, county clerks put local slates who filed joint petitions on the ballot in the order that their names appeared; now, the candidates won’t know if they’ll run as Vieira and Anthony — or Anthony and Vieira — until Thursday.
Assuming U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi’s decision isn’t stayed, the same will apply to county commissioner races with more than one candidate.
The real time-consuming portion of the ballot draw will come in counties that have Democratic county committee elections in June.
In counties that have gender-neutral county committee races where two candidates run for two seats, county clerks will now need to conduct draws in each voting district, even if there are just two candidates, if they accept a literal interpretation of Quraishi’s order that “implements for each office on the ballot, a randomized ballot order system (e.g. random draw) which affords each candidate for the same office an equal chance at obtaining the first ballot position.”
In a county like Essex, that could set up hundreds of individual random drawings.