The race for the Democratic nomination for Congress in New Jersey’s 2nd district has tightened since Tuesday night, with Joseph Salerno’s margin over Tim Alexander dropping from 441 to 397 after election officials determined that some machines used in in-person early voting in Atlantic County had not been tallied.
It was discovered on Wednesday that poll workers at five early voting centers had pulled the memory sticks from the voting machines before the data had finished downloading. Those machines – three in Atlantic City, one in Egg Harbor Township, and one in Hamilton Township – involved 127 votes from both parties.
After receiving permission from the New Jersey Attorney General’s office, and in the presence of Democratic and Republican election officials, a representative of ES&S, the county’s voting machine vendor, downloaded data onto new memory sticks.
Alexander picked up 37 votes, Carolyn Rush added eight, and Rodney Dean gained one – but Salerno’s vote total in Atlantic County dropped by sixteen.
Additional votes were tallied in Ocean County, where Salerno gained 52 votes, with 49 extra for Alexander, and 33 more for Rush; Dean remained the same.
Salerno now leads Alexander, 12,778 to 12,371, a one-point race, with 7,325 for Rush and 1,138 for Dean.
The four candidates are competing for the chance to take on Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) in the general election.
There are 504 provisional ballots in Atlantic County that won’t be counted until next week. Some of them likely came from voters who had already received vote-by-mail ballots; last year, about 77% of the provisionals were cast by VBM voters.
There are less than 700 uncounted mail-in ballots in Atlantic County; 383 late-arriving mail-in ballots from Democrats arrived yesterday and an additional 88 today, but the party identification of those 88 is not yet clear. Additionally, about 40 cure letters are still out in Atlantic; the party split is also unclear.
Atlantic County Assignment Judge Michael Blee will decide the fate of 1,803 vote-by-mail ballots – roughly 700 of them from Democrats – that have not been counted. The Board of Elections opened those ballots before May 6; New Jersey election law doesn’t permit them to be opened and prepared for counting until five days before Election Day.
The Board of Elections deadlocked 2-2 along party lines on Tuesday morning, with Democrats voting to count the votes. That means Blee gets to break the tie.
Alexander won vote-by-mail ballots by about eight percentage points. If Blee permits the votes to be counted, and if they fall along the same percentages as the rest of the mail-in ballots, that will allow Alexander to cut Salerno’s lead by less than 100 votes.