After two circulators of Brittany Claybrooks’ nominating petitions to run in a special Democratic congressional primary failed to appear in court last week despite being served with a subpoena, the top lawyer for the New Jersey Democratic State Committee is telling Secretary of State Tahesha Way to toss the candidate, a former political director of Andy Kim’ U.S. Senate campaign, off the ballot.
Attorney Raj Parikh told Way that she should invalidate petitions circulated by Tejeda and Castor. He claims some of the signatures were forgeries, and their failure to appear in court to answer questions about the petitions they circulated should have caused Administrative Law Judge Susana Espana Guerrero to refute them.
“If permitted to stand, the Division (of Elections) would be endorsing that circulators need only ignore a subpoena to testify to allow their misconduct to lack any meaningful consequences,” Parikh explained. “Such a standard does not exist anywhere in New Jersey law, nor should it exist for a process critical to democratic principles such (as) nominating petitions.”
Guerrero had already disqualified 65 of Claybrooks’ 352 signatures for technical issues, including ineligibility to sign and signatures that didn’t match.
But the judge said in a ruling issued on Saturday that she was “not persuaded that the burden to demonstrate fraud” was enough to remove Claybrooks from the ballot.
Parikh pointed out one family where every signature was in the same handwriting, suggesting that one individual signed for her entire household.
“The last name was literally and consistently misspelled across multiple people in the same household,” he said. “What indorser misspells their own name, and when reviewed against Statewide Voter Records, and how can this information not have evidential value? Rather, contrary to the Initial Decision, this is as close of facial evidence as can be gleaned from physically signed petition booklets and it more than satisfies the preponderance of the evidence standard”
Parikh also maintains that the judge erred when she overruled multiple objections.
The final decision to allow Claybrooks, a former East Orange councilwoman, on the ballot belongs to Way.