No plans for further tinkering on primary executive order, Murphy says

Gov. Phil Murphy doesn’t expect to make additional changes to the state’s July primaries to account for mail-in ballots that arrive more than a week after July 7 or reach election officials without a postmark.

“I don’t have any plans to tinker with the executive order,” the governor said Wednesday. “And I do think both the postmark date and seven days are sufficient.”

Mail-in votes cast during non-partisan municipal races held on May 12 are still coming more than two weeks after those polls closed.

Under state law, election officials are allowed to count vote by mail ballots that arrive in the 48 hours following an election as long as the ballots are postmarked by election day.

The governor has expanded that window to seven days to account for delays in ballot delivery during July’s races.

Nearly 2,000 ballots in Essex County and nearly 1,300 ballots in Bergen County won’t be counted because they arrived late or without a post mark.

In some cases, ballots took close to a month to reach election officials, and even ballots cast at the same time within some households have been delivered days after one another.