This story was updated at 4:33 p.m. to reflect the fact that the Passaic County Clerk is also dropping her appeal.
After the Third Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi’s decision mandating office-block Democratic primary ballots yesterday, all of New Jersey’s county clerks have dropped their appeal of his decision, leaving only one appellant left to fight out the case next week.
Of the 16 county clerks who were part of the appeal as of yesterday, 13 – clerks in Atlantic, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Essex, Gloucester, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Morris, Ocean, Somerset, and Union Counties – have since filed paperwork withdrawing themselves from the case. Monmouth County Clerk Christine Hanlon told the New Jersey Globe yesterday that she will also withdraw, while Bergen County Clerk John Hogan told PoliticoNJ the same thing; Passaic County Clerk Danielle Ireland-Imhof has decided to also drop her appeal.
That would leave just the Camden County Democratic Committee, represented by South Jersey Democratic stalwart Bill Tambussi, as an appellant in the case.
In their request for a stay, the coalition of county clerks had pointed towards the difficulties they would face in creating new Democratic primary ballots without county lines in time for this year’s primary election, per Quraishi’s order. But with the stay denied, and a decision from the Third Circuit not likely to come for another few weeks, most of those clerks evidently decided it wouldn’t be worth it to continue the legal fight.
At 3 p.m. today, clerks will conduct ballot draws to determine the order of candidates on primary ballots; from there, the work of designing and printing ballots in time for the June 4 primary will begin.
“As I have stated previously, this appeal was about the timing of the federal court’s decision and the immediate impact on ballot preparation and the election process,” Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello said today in a statement. “The denial of a stay means that the ballot design and drawing of candidate positions will proceed as ordered by the Court. At this time, my office will move forward in preparing ballots for mailing for the upcoming NJ primary election.”
Warren County Clerk Holly Mackey never appealed the case to begin with; two other clerks, Burlington County Clerk Joanne Schwartz and Hudson County Clerk Junior Maldonado, had withdrawn from the appeal before the stay was denied. Clerks in Sussex and Salem Counties aren’t part of the lawsuit at all, since their counties already use office-block ballots.
The fact that none of the state’s county clerks will be participating in the ongoing appeal could serve to substantially weaken the case against Quraishi’s decision. If the state’s clerks are proceeding to design ballots as Quraishi ordered, then the argument by the remaining appellants that executing that decision is an undue burden may not be as convincing.
But it’s anyone’s guess as to how the Third Circuit will approach the case; the judges could have dismissed the appeal entirely yesterday, but they chose to hear oral arguments instead, indicating that there’s at least something that piques their interest in the case.
The legal fight is specifically over a preliminary injunction granted to Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) and two other congressional candidates, who argued that the continued existence of the county line – the ballot design system that groups party-endorsed candidates together – constituted irreparable harm to their campaigns.
Quraishi wrote in his opinion that he believed Kim and his co-plaintiffs had a strong chance of succeeding on the merits of their case on the county line’s constitutionality, and thus suspended the line for this year’s primary. (He later clarified that his decision only applied to Democrats, since none of the plaintiffs were Republicans.)
But the larger fight over whether the county line is, in fact, constitutional is still to come. A separate lawsuit on the line has been steadily proceeding since 2020; a status conference in that case, which is also being heard by Quraishi, has been scheduled for next week.