Saying it’s “just too late” in the election cycle to print and mail primary ballots on time, Superior Court Judge John E. Harrington today denied a bid by four Republican candidates for federal office to invalidate Republican organization lines this year.
“It’s too comprehensive a change for this court do this now,” Harrington said after a multi-day hearing on a lawsuit filed by U.S. Senate candidate Albert Harshaw and House candidates Shirley Maia-Cusick, Gregg Mele, and Hector Castillo to force county clerks to follow a federal judge’s preliminary injunction that ended lines and mandated office block ballots for the 2024 primary.
Harrington, who was an election lawyer before joining the bench, said he conducted his own review of the election calendar and found it would take county clerks at least 10-14 days to redraw and print ballots with a reshaped Republican primary.
“I applaud them for being able to do it in the Democratic primary, but they need that time in order to do that here,” he said.
Still, he chastised the county clerks for allowing Republicans to have a line at all after the Quraishi ruling. Last week, he upheld Burlington County Clerk Joanne Schwartz’s decision to take away the GOP line, saying she had the discretion to do that.
“That’s not to say that they (the Republicans) acted properly, by the way. I’m not saying, ‘Yes you did the right thing in terms of not doing that.,’” stated Harrington. “I believe that that they should have considered what the attorney general said and what the court said about considering changing, and the Republican Party, they decided not to. I mean, I’m not faulting it. I’m just saying they decided not to.”
Harrington said the county clerks – everyone but Schwartz and the clerks in Salem and Sussex, which already use office block ballots – decided “they were going to follow the old the old approach for the Republican primary.”
“I would have wished it was different because of the fact that I believe that there are those substantive rights, but they’re not they weren’t being compelled by anybody, and here it is, too little, too late,” said Harrington.
But Harrington said if the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reverses U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi’s ruling and returns the issue to the county clerks, he reserved the right to reopen the case.
“All that comment and all those arguments and all those facts presented to me about, gee, it’s too late and it’s too expensive will be problematic for me,” Harrington said.
He said the case will remain active and will have a case management conference in the next few weeks.
Harrington said the case could have been brought earlier, and that he wasn’t troubled by a federal deadline to commence mailing overseas military ballots on April 20.