Where the numbers stand in LD8’s tight Assembly race

After an unexpected batch of Burlington County ballots were counted yesterday, the 8th legislative district’s Assembly race has suddenly become New Jersey’s closest contest, with Assemblyman Brandon Umba (R-Medford) – who had previously been declared the victor – trailing Democrat Andrea Katz by 27 votes.

Burlington County has not made any statement clarifying what the newly counted votes are or why they hadn’t been counted previously. (To be clear, there is absolutely no evidence of fraud, and neither side believes anything untoward happened.)

As things currently stand, Assemblyman Michael Torrissi (R-Hammonton) is in first place for two seats with 27,502 votes, or 25.4% of the vote; Katz is in second with 27,037 (24.9%), Umba in third with 27,010 (also 24.9%), and Democrat Anthony Angelozzi is in fourth with 26,849 (24.8%). In the district’s Senate race, former Burlington County Freeholder Latham Tiver (R-Southampton) beat his Democratic challenger, former Pemberton Township Councilwoman Gaye Burton, 28,013 votes to 26,648 (51% to 49%).

There are still several hundred provisional and mail-in votes left to count, so the final outcome is unclear. But Katz, the Democratic municipal chair in Chesterfield, increasingly appears to have an edge against Umba, something that both parties are acknowledging. (Torrissi, meanwhile, is almost certainly safe.)

If Katz does prevail, she’d be the first Democrat to win a seat in the 8th district since 1973; Democrats heavily invested in the district in 2019 and 2021 after State Sen. Dawn Addiego (D-Evesham) switched parties, but were never able to win. Katz’s unexpected victory would also bring Democrats up to a 52-28 majority in the Assembly, a six-seat gain.

Right now, Katz and Angelozzi have a combined 51.5% of the vote in Burlington County, which cast nearly 90% of the district’s votes, and 34.5% of the vote in the much smaller, much redder Atlantic County portion of the district.

Approximately 655 provisional ballots have yet to be counted: 577 of them in Burlington County and 78 in Atlantic County. (At least, according to one estimation; there’s some inconsistent information on exactly how many provisional ballots there are.) Since provisional ballots are only used by voters who had issues voting – their registration was incomplete, for example, or they had requested a mail-in ballot before trying to vote in-person – not all provisional ballots will likely be counted.

If the 2021 election is any indication, the provisional ballots that are counted may lean slightly more Democratic than the district as a whole. In 2021, Republican Jack Ciattarelli carried provisional ballots in the towns that are now part of the 8th legislative district by a 52%-48% margin, slightly less than his 54%-45% margin districtwide.

If that same slight shift is present this year, Katz and Angelozzi would win the uncounted provisional ballots by a couple of percentage points. In Burlington County, twice as many provisional ballots were cast by registered Democrats than by registered Republicans, further evidence that Democrats may benefit from the uncounted provisionals.

The bigger boost for Katz, though, will probably come from uncounted mail-in ballots. There are currently 216 uncounted mail-in ballots in the Atlantic County portion of the 8th district and 64 uncounted mail-in ballots in the district’s Burlington County portion, although some of those ballots may have issues that need to be cured. A few more stragglers could still come in on or before Monday as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.

In Atlantic County, the mail-in ballots that have already been counted have broken for 8th district Democrats by a 56%-44% margin. Burlington County hasn’t reported its results by vote type, but given Democrats’ tendency to do well among mail-in voters, it’s very likely that any remaining mail-in ballots there will heavily favor Katz and Angelozzi.

The timeline for when both provisional and mail-in ballots will be counted remains murky. Thanks to Veterans Day, elections offices in both counties are closed for the day today, which will push the verifying and counting of ballots into early next week at the very least.

It’s not clear whether the Burlington County Board of Elections has provided 48-hour notice for a meeting next week; the longer they wait to provide notice, the longer it will take them to begin processing the remaining uncounted ballots. Atlantic County, meanwhile, isn’t planning on counting its remaining votes until next Wednesday, though pressure from both parties may move that timeline forward.

“It’s absolutely pathetic that our Atlantic County Board of Elections went home on Election Night before every vote by mail ballot was processed,” Atlantic GOP chairman Don Purdy said in a scathing statement. “I’m calling on the Board of Elections’ Republican and Democratic commissioners to get off their asses and back to work, because the people of Atlantic County deserve nothing less.”

One other unknown: cure letters, which are sent to voters who submitted defective vote-by-mail ballots that need to be fixed in order to be counted. Both parties will undoubtedly be devoting a lot of energy in the coming weeks to making sure that their own voters respond to cure letters; there’s probably more upside there for Democrats, whose voters submitted the lion’s share of defective ballots.

To summarize, Katz currently leads by 27 votes, and the remaining pools of uncounted votes are more likely than not to favor her over Umba. That probably makes her the favorite to pull off a significant upset and win an Assembly seat.

But there are still a lot of uncertainties, and even if Katz does end the count with a lead, things may not be over yet. Close elections in New Jersey frequently are subjected to months of legal wrangling, and a recount looks highly likely in the 8th district given the very narrow margin involved. Katz may end up as an assemblywoman – but there’s a long road still ahead of her before then.