The end of the county line has officially begun.
U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi approved settlements today ordering county clerks in Burlington and Middlesex Counties to permanently do away with the county line, the unique New Jersey system that allows county parties to put their endorsed candidates in shared rows or columns on primary ballots. (Quraishi had previously struck down the county line for this year’s Democratic primaries specifically, but that decision didn’t apply to future years.)
Quraishi’s orders require that, going forward, the two counties’ primary ballots be ordered by office sought rather than by party endorsement, a design known as “office-block ballots” that is in use in most of the rest of the country. All primary candidates will be given equal opportunity to get top billing on the ballot, with random drawings conducted for each office.
The orders only apply to the two county clerks involved, and to the Middlesex County Democratic Organization (MCDO), which withdrew from the litigation last month; that’s simply because Burlington and Middlesex are the only two counties so far to have submitted settlements to the court.
But given the contours of the case, the writing is probably on the wall for the line in the remaining 17 counties that still use it. And if the line is indeed abolished across New Jersey, that could bring about major changes in the state’s politics, which have long been dominated by county parties and party bosses.
Litigation over the county line has been ongoing since 2020, when former congressional candidate Christine Conforti and several others filed a lawsuit alleging that it provided unconstitutional advantages to the candidates it was conferred upon. That case languished in the federal courts system for several years without a clear resolution on the horizon.
In February of this year, however, Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) jumpstarted the process when he filed a preliminary injunction asking Quraishi to overturn the line for this year’s primary, arguing that his Senate campaign would be irreparably harmed if the line remained in place. Kim won his case, and every Democrat around the state ran on line-free ballots this year; Quraishi’s order did not apply to Republicans, since they were not involved as plaintiffs.
While the Kim case only affected the 2024 primary Quraisihi’s decision specifically laid out the ways he believed the line was unconstitutional, essentially guaranteeing that when he eventually ruled on the Conforti case, it would not be in the favor of the county clerks, who by virtue of their role were tasked with defending the line in court.
Technically, four different settlements were approved today: two with the Burlington County Clerk and the MCDO in the Conforti case, and two with the Burlington and Middlesex County Clerks in the Kim case. The Burlington County Clerk has agreed to pay $25,000 to Kim’s lawyers for legal fees, and the Middlesex County Clerk will pay $32,533.
Kim, who ultimately won the Democratic Senate primary on line-free ballots, said that the settlements in Burlington and Middlesex are an encouraging step towards abolishing the line entirely.
“The court just approved our first settlement agreements – making Burlington & Middlesex counties the first to permanently stop the ‘county line’ ballot,” the congressman said on Twitter. “Let’s build momentum across all counties to get NJ the fair ballot it deserves. The start of a new era of politics.”