Altman petition challenge will go a second day

A 12-hour-long hearing wasn’t enough to adjudicate whether or not 12th district candidate Sue Altman submitted enough valid petition signatures to reach the Democratic primary ballot, and will go a second day.

At the end of today’s hearing, Administrative Law Judge Michael Stanzione said that after hundreds of signatures were invalidated, Altman is still sitting at 689, quite a few more than the 500 required by law. Because of the hodgepodge nature of the hearing, none of the parties involved could say exactly how many of those 689 remaining signatures are still under threat of invalidation.

Proceedings will resume at 10 a.m. tomorrow to see whether Altman’s opponents can push her below the ballot access threshold.

Altman’s petitions were subject to three separate challenges, all of which were heard today: one from Liz Rosenberg, a staffer on rival NJ-12 candidate Sam Wang’s campaign; one from Jansel Fuentes Jimenez, who has ties to Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, another NJ-12 candidate; and a third from the “Concerned Citizens’ Coalition Against Carpetbagging,” a group represented by Eric Salcedo, who seems to once again be affiliated with Wang.

The three challenges were overlapping but distinct, which formed the basis of an early unsuccessful protest from Brett Pugach, the Altman campaign’s attorney.

One of the challenges failed to provide detailed reasoning behind each signature objection, while another didn’t even cover enough signatures to push Altman below the threshold, which Pugach argued was grounds for dismissal. Stanzione disagreed and allowed all three challenges to proceed at once, which frequently made it unclear throughout the day which signatures were being challenged and why.

Many of the signatures Altman gathered, especially those circulated in Plainfield by a man named Michael Gray, proved to have a variety of defects, ranging from GOP party affiliations to missing registrations to incorrect addresses. Some of Gray’s petition sheets were riddled with voters like Louie Lunchmeat and Jesus Christ, and had barely any valid voters among them.

“The only time Gray has been right has been by accident,” Walter Luers, the attorney representing Rosenberg, said late in the evening. “There’s no way that [Gray] actually tried to get registered voters. There’s no way. Either that, or they were just incompetent to the point where they shouldn’t be signing anything under oath.”

All in all, 250 signatures were ruled invalid via line-by-line challenges, with another 17 reserved for later judgment.

Also at issue were 83 signatures gathered by a handful of Princeton University students who are registered as Democrats in other states. The Altman campaign said they had been told by the Division of Elections that this was acceptable and pointed to past judicial rulings to support their claim, but Stanzione said that since state statute technically prohibits out-of-state circulators, he ruled them ineligible.

“The statute requires the person be a registered voter in this state,” Stanzione said. “I don’t think I can venture off that. I know what the persuasive cases you cited say, but they have not changed the statute.”

Thirty-five signatures collected by another young circulator who was registered with the Green Party, however, were allowed into Altman’s count after her campaign provided evidence that the circulator had changed her party affiliation to Democratic yesterday.

While Stanzione will issue an advisory opinion at the conclusion of the hearing, the ultimate decision about whether to keep Altman on the ballot will lie with Secretary of State Dale Caldwell.

If Altman were to fail to make the ballot, it would represent an enormous shakeup of the race for the 12th district, where Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) is retiring. Twelve other Democrats are running for the seat, but Altman’s fundraising and her previous run for a neighboring district have made her one of the race’s early frontrunners.