Call it Callaway’s Law, if it passes.
Assemblyman Sterley Stanley (D-East Brunswick) is introducing legislation that would prohibit ballot messengers or bearers from being paid.
The bill follows the arrest last month of Craig Callaway, a former Atlantic City Council President and veteran ballot harvester. Federal prosecutors allege that Calaway set up a fraudulent scheme to illegally harvest and cast vote-by-mail ballots in the 2022 general election.
Federal prosecutors claim Callaway and others working for him approached numerous voters in Atlantic City and offered to pay them $30 to $50 to act as authorized messengers for VBM voters. Those messengers allegedly went to the county clerk’s office with one to four applications for a mail-in ballot, waited for them to be processed, and left in possession of ballots.
Instead of delivering the ballots to the voters, they gave them to Callaway. Those ballots never made it to the voters, who federal investigators say never authorized the VBM application or submitted a ballot. Callaway or his team allegedly cast those votes.
“This bill represents a necessary change so that our state can recognize that to carry a ballot is to carry a voter’s voice across the threshold of anonymity and give it life independent of its own, and anyone who seeks to manipulate this sacred duty should be held accountable for that nefarious act,” Stanley said.
Sterley’s bill proposes that ‘no person who serves as an authorized messenger or as a bearer shall accept consideration of any sort to serve, nor shall any person offer or give consideration of any sort to an authorized messenger or a bearer to serve.” The proposed law defines consideration as cash, goods, services, or intangible property.
New Jersey election law allows messengers and bearers to deliver up to three ballots to and from county election officials.