Judge says Zdan can’t claim he was endorsed by the ‘Union County Republican Committee’

Richard Tabor won the endorsement of the Union County Republican Organization in his campaign for U.S. Senate, but rival candidate Alex Zdan’s ballot slogan in Union County – “Union County Republican Committee Endorsed Candidates” – might have given voters other ideas. A Superior Court judge says not so fast.

Union County Republican Chairman Carlos Santos filed a lawsuit on April 13 – long after the standard deadline for petition and slogan objections had passed – arguing that Zdan’s slogan would mislead voters and constituted irreparable harm, given that the official party slogan is the near-identical “Union County Republican Organization Endorsed Candidates.” After an hourlong hearing today, Superior Court Judge John Hudak agreed.

“Mr. Zdan appears on the ballot as ‘Union County Republican Committee Endorsed Candidates.’ The statement is in and of itself a falsehood,” Hudak said. “Since he has not received the endorsement, voters will wrongly attribute the committee’s official designation to a candidate whom the committee explicitly rejected.”

Hudak issued a temporary injunction giving Zdan, who did not attend the hearing to defend his choice of slogan, 24 hours to either change the slogan or file an objection to the decision. Ballots are set to be printed imminently, and will start being mailed to voters on April 18.

Speaking with the New Jersey Globe shortly after the hearing ended, Zdan did not say what he planned to do; he claimed that the matter was entirely a dispute between Santos and election officials with no involvement from himself, even though he was a defendant in the lawsuit and Hudak mentioned him by name repeatedly.

“I will be making that decision in due course,” Zdan said of whether he’ll change his ballot slogan.

The art of ballot slogans has long been a fickle one in New Jersey, with candidates who don’t win actual county party endorsements frequently choosing slogans that might insinuate to voters that they have. Most famously, Jim Florio attempted to run on a number of nearly indistinguishable slogans – including “Union County Democratic Committee Inc.” – during his 2000 campaign for U.S. Senate before being shot down by a judge.

The issue also came up this year in the Democratic primary for the 12th congressional district, where Squire Servance filed to run under the slogan “Middlesex County Democrats for Change.” Middlesex County Clerk Nancy Pinkin attempted to challenge that slogan as being overly similar to “Middlesex County Democratic Organization,” but the matter never made it to court, and the state Division of Elections rejected it because it wasn’t issued until April 6, long after the deadline for challenges had passed.

Santos’s challenge was similarly untimely, but he argued, successfully, that there was good reason for that: Zdan had originally filed to run without a slogan in Union County, only changing it to the near-identical slogan at the last minute.

According to Santos’s lawsuit, he requested the official list of candidates and their slogans from the Division of Elections on March 25, and Zdan was still listed as “slogan pending” in Union County. Santos said that he only learned Zdan had changed his slogan on April 2, the day of the ballot drawing, several days after the March 27 deadline for challenges; he quickly complained to the Division of Elections, but his complaint was rejected because it had missed the deadline.

Though Zdan did not make an appearance in court, Santos’s objection was opposed by Deputy Attorney General Gordon Estes on behalf of the Secretary of State and the Division of Elections. Estes said that the objection came far too late in the process to proceed with a slogan change, and also noted that a Zdan ally had in fact registered an entity called “Union County Republican Committee Endorsed Candidates” and given Zdan permission to use its name on the ballot.

Alan Levy, representing the Union County Republican Organization, called such tactics “Orwellian,” a characterization Hudak later endorsed.

“I would argue that the Secretary of State and the Division of Elections had a duty to the voters to see these two slogans, which are nearly identical, and to have used its authority to say, ‘This is going to confuse the voters, they’re going to be misled,’” Levy said.

Zdan did receive the endorsements of ten county Republican organizations around New Jersey; in most counties where he did not receive the official endorsement, he instead filed under the slogan “America First Republicans.” 

The four exceptions were Union, Hudson, Somerset, and Hunterdon Counties, where county parties endorsed Tabor but Zdan filed with endorsement-esque ballot slogans anyways: “Official Republican Endorsed Candidate” in Hudson and Somerset and “Hunterdon County Republican Committee” in Hunterdon. Those slogans evidently did not draw a challenge.