The end of the long legal fight over New Jersey’s county line ballot design is in sight.
Within the last week, four county clerks – in Camden, Monmouth, Somerset, and Mercer Counties – have reached settlement agreements with Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) that require them to nix the controversial county line and use office-block ballots going forward. They join the Burlington, Middlesex, Warren, Essex, Gloucester, Cumberland, and Atlantic County Clerks in doing so.
And another five clerks – in Passaic, Ocean, Hunterdon, Hudson, and Morris Counties – have submitted letters to the court indicating that they have reached tentative settlement agreements that still need to be signed off on by their local county boards of commissioners. Assuming that all five are approved, that will mean that 16 of the 19 clerks named as defendants in Kim’s lawsuit will have settled. (Two of New Jersey’s 21 counties, Salem and Sussex, didn’t use county line ballots to begin with and thus have not been part of this year’s legal proceedings.)
The crux of each settlement is the same: the county clerks will no longer organize their primary ballots by party endorsement, which has been a key part of New Jersey ballot design for decades, and will instead organize them more neutrally by office, aligning them with other states around the country. The clerks have also agreed to each pay Kim $32,533 to cover his legal fees.
Kim first filed his lawsuit against the line in February of this year, when he was campaigning for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination against First Lady Tammy Murphy, who was set to run on the county line in much of the state. U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi ruled in Kim’s favor, banning the use of the line in this year’s Democratic primaries and heavily hinting that he would strike it down permanently in the future; the settlements that have been rolling in this fall are meant to avoid a protracted legal battle that the clerks would likely lose.
But one remaining unknown is what the state legislature will choose to do. A bipartisan Assembly Select Committee on Ballot Design held its first hearing on Tuesday with the potential intention of eventually proposing ballot design reforms, and some of its members still seem to have some reservations about office-block ballots.
“Everybody was used to going in and seeing the line,” Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin (D-Newark) said, per the New Jersey Monitor. “Whether people agree with it or not, it was just very simplistic. Now, when you’re talking about office-block voting, you’re really talking about voting for a person in a specific office and understanding what they do.”