State won’t provide lawyers for county election boards in RNC voting records suit

The New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Law (DOL) will not provide legal services to county Boards of Elections in a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee, saying the National Voter Registration Act falls outside the scope of its representation.

“Information requests under the NVRA do not arise under Title 19,” Deputy Attorney General Brian Ragunan said in an email to election officials.  “Accordingly, responding to these NVRA requests falls outside the scope of DOL’s usual representation of the counties.”

This represents a major policy shift by the State & Elections section of the Division of Law, and now leaves counties without a lawyer – and on the hook to pay for outside counsel, since the County Counsel represents the county clerk and is likely conflicted out.

Ragunan did suggest that counties “may find value in coordination on the NVRA responses, even if DOL is not providing legal representation.”

On Tuesday, the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court to force the state to turn over voting records.

The lawsuit followed Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s announcement that a software glitch resulted in about 6,600 noncitizens being registered to vote, with fewer than 400 casting ballots in 2024.

The RNC had asked the state to provide information by September detailing how the noncitizens wound up on the voter rolls, who had been removed and why, and what steps were being taken to remove others who are ineligible to vote.

In July, Sherrill rejected a demand from the U.S. Department of Justice to turn over the names, birth dates, addresses, nationalities, and other information of those who were erroneously registered.

The dispute over the noncitizen registrations comes as President Donald Trump continues to make evidence-free assertions that the 2020 election was stolen. He has demanded that Congress pass the SAVE America Act, which would require registrants to prove their citizenship and provide certain voter identification.

Representation of state boards goes back over 40 years, when then-Attorney General Irwin Kimmelman issued a foundational legal directive that every state office but the governor, the legislature and the judiciary would be clients of the attorney general.

In his email, Ragunan referred only to Title 19, but some aspects of local elections administered by the Board of Elections fall under Title 40, which covers local government statutes.

Assemblyman Mike Inganamort (R-Chester) said he’s been worried that something like this might happen.

“I recognize that this is the Attorney General’s decision, but it highlights a concern I raised with the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act last year, which took away the counsel of the Attorney General’s office that county boards of elections have traditionally counted on,” he said,  “This is the first case of counties being on their own, and it won’t come cheap.”

The decision comes three years after former Attorney General Peter Harvey recommended that county Boards of Elections and Superintendents of Elections obtain legal representation outside the Attorney General’s Office.

Harvey made the recommendation in a 2023 report commissioned by then-Attorney General Matt Platkin following an investigation into vote-counting problems in Monmouth County during the 2022 general election.

“Representation of these entities from outside the Attorney General’s Office would enable the Office to further focus its efforts on enforcing New Jersey’s civil rights laws,” Harvey said.

At the time, the Attorney General’s Office maintained separate functions for enforcing voting rights and representing county election officials.  In 2022, Platkin’s office said its Voter Protection Initiative would operate independently from Division of Law attorneys representing county election officials and the secretary of state.

Harvey’s recommendation did not immediately end the Division of Law’s role advising county election officials.  The Attorney General’s Office subsequently continued deploying Division of Law attorneys to handle inquiries from county election officials, describing it as a practice followed in previous elections.