U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi will hold a telephone conference on Thursday morning to address a briefing schedule and set a hearing date on Andy Kim’s motion to get a preliminary injunction to eliminate organization lines in the June primary.
Quraishi’s scheduling decision came one day after Kim, a three-term congressman running for the U.S. Senate, and two other Democratic House candidates filed a lawsuit aimed at eliminating New Jersey’s county line system; that signals that the federal judge is prepared to move quickly.
Right now, Quraishi might be the most powerful person in New Jersey politics.
Should Kim prevail, it would redesign New Jersey’s ballots to the “office block” style, in which candidates are grouped by the office they are seeking rather than by party or endorsement. This is how elections are run in most states.
A schedule automatically generated by the court clerk had set a motion date of April 1, but Quraishi’s order for a case management conference appears to supersede this. April 1 comes after filing day and just days before the ballot draw.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Tonianne Bongiovanni will also be part of the federal court team involved in the lawsuit.
Kim’s exigent circumstances — he’s on the ballot in June — jumpstarted a lawsuit that began four years ago when a group of unsuccessful progressive candidates and New Jersey Working Families launched their legal battle after the 2020 primary, arguing that organization lines provide a substantial disadvantage to off-the-line challengers.
In 2022, Quraishi ruled that a lawsuit seeking to declare organization lines to be unconstitutional in New Jersey primary elections may move forward, opening the door to discovery and depositions. This was an enormous win for opponents of the line.
A group of county clerks had sought the dismissal of the suit, arguing that state law grants them considerable discretion in designing ballots. Quraishi disagreed with Ocean County Clerk Scott Colabella that the “theory of diminution of votes” should be dismissed because it presented a “non-justiciable political question.”
Quraishi found that the bracketing system used by both parties in primaries “imposes a moderate burden on the right to associate.”