A state appellate court will allow Alex Mendez’s name to remain on the ballot in the Paterson mayoral race , allowing Passaic County election officials to begin printing and mailing vote-by-mail ballots for the May 10 non-partisan municipal elections.
The mailing of ballots, which was supposed to have commenced on March 26, was halted after the appellate court took 12 days to render their 11-page decision.
The ruling sets up a race between Mendez, a city councilman who is under indictment for ballot fraud, and Mayor Andre Sayegh. Three other candidates are also in the race.
Mendez had filed with 872 signatures – five more than he needed to get on the ballot – and many of the signatories had also signed petitions for other candidates. A Paterson resident, Vincent Iannacone, challenged the petitions under a state law that would have had all the multi-signers invalidated.
Attorneys for Mendez claimed that since he filed his petitions first, those signers ought t count.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Brogan ruled against a challenge to Alex Mendez’s petitions on April 8, refusing to invalidate signatures of voters who also signed other petitions. The appeal was filed on April 11.
But the appeal remained in the hands of two appellate court judges, Mary Gibbons Whipple and Ronald Susswein, for nearly two weeks before their ruling was issued today.
“The statute authorized the Clerk to determine how to validate the petitions and that the Clerk’s decision to count first-filed petitions was not an abuse of discretion. The Clerk explained its long-used rule and applied it consistently,” Whipple wrote in her decision. “We are satisfied the Clerk did not act arbitrarily or capriciously in selecting and applying this rule as the general remedy to address the challenged petitions. Moreover, the Clerk did not act arbitrarily and capriciously in counting Mendez’s first-filed petitions because it applied the remedy as it had outlined in the election packet in this case.”
Election officials are hoping to print ballots today and get them in the mail by tomorrow, the New Jersey Globe has learned.
“This is an abomination. Our goal is to make people think elections are fair because they really are,” said an election official who spoke under the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “Judges need to take elections more seriously. This was handled poorly.”