A panel of state appellate court judges today reversed a lower court ruling that had ordered 71 organization-backed candidates for county committee seats in Cherry Hill to be seated alongside three progressives who won the June 2025 primary, concluding that voter intent must prevail.
The three elected candidates will have the authority to fill all 71 vacancies.
“The majority of voters selected the oval demarcating the Progressive Democrats to serve as elected members on the Cherry Hill Committee,” the decision stated. “The election result left a failure to elect candidates for the remaining seventy-one seats.”
Cherry Hill elects its county committee members at-large in a winner-take-all contest, with a single vote cast for an entire slate. A South Jersey Progressive Democrats slate of three — Susan Druckenbrod, Rena Margulis, and Dave Stahl — received 5,547 votes, while the 74-member party-endorsed slate received 3,350.
Superior Court Judge Michael Kassel had sided with the Camden County Democratic Committee after a hearing last July, ordering 71 candidates from the organization slate to fill the vacancies. The three winning candidates had sought the authority to appoint those members themselves.
“This looks like a tie to me,” Kassel said in his ruling. “There were two ties — a tie for first, or a tie for second and third, and a tie for fourth through seventy-fourth. It’s a perfect fit with the statute, but it’s close enough.”
The appellate court disagreed, finding that Kassel applied the wrong statute — one governing general elections. Because county committee members are selected in a primary, the panel said vacancies can arise from a “failure to elect.”
The judges also rejected a challenge to the quorum, ruling that the quorum is based on the three sitting members and that vacant seats are not counted.
Former Attorney General Matt Platkin supported the progressives, filing a brief on their behalf in the appeal.
He called it “a great victory for democracy.”
“I was proud to file an amicus in this case as attorney general, and this decision is clearly right on the law,” Platkin stated. “We cannot only profess to care about the rule of law some of the time.”
Kassel had framed his decision as a matter of fairness.
“You have 74 vacancies. You have 77 people who want to fill those 74 vacancies. Fair enough?” he said. “It seems to me the fairest approach is to give the top 74 vote-getters the job, so to speak. Somebody will finish first. Somebody will finish 15th. Somebody will finish 74th. The person who finishes 75th, 76th, 77th — they’re out of luck. It’s not a controversial position. It’s true, if you treat all 77 as a binary.”
The Cherry Hill Democratic organization, which had been in limbo awaiting the appellate decision, has not formally organized since last year. Camden County Democrats have worked around the vacancies, but had a vacancy arisen in the state legislature or on the county commission, Cherry Hill would have been short 71 votes in a special convention to select a replacement.
The ruling by the three-judge panel — Jessica Mayer, Katie Gummer and James Paganelli — was unanimous.
The appellate ruling is unpublished and was issued without oral argument, meaning the panel decided the case based solely on written briefs. It does not serve as a binding precedent. The matter has been remanded to the trial court.
The next county committee election in Camden County is set for June 2027.