Three South Jersey county clerks – Gloucester County Clerk James Hogan, Cumberland County Clerk Celeste Riley, and Atlantic County Clerk Joe Giralo – have reached settlements in the lawsuit over the county line, meaning that seven New Jersey counties are now officially set to use office-block ballots in future primary elections.
The settlement agreements are functionally identical to those previously submitted by clerk’s offices in Burlington, Middlesex, Warren, and Essex Counties. They bar the clerks from designing primary ballots that group candidates together based on party endorsement – a long-controversial system that was successfully challenged in court earlier this year by Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) – and require them to organize ballots by office instead starting in next year’s primary.
The Gloucester, Cumberland, and Atlantic clerk’s offices have agreed to pay $32,533 each to Kim to cover legal fees.
An eight county is likely to join their ranks soon; the Somerset County Board of Commissioners approved a resolution on Tuesday evening authorizing a settlement put forward by Somerset County Clerk Steve Peter.
It’s likely that the trickle of counties reaching settlements in the case will continue, but there’s a wild card still in play: the ballot design committee recently launched by Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Woodbridge) and Assembly Minority Leader John DiMaio (R-Hackettstown). The 12-member Assembly panel aims to study potential improvements to the state’s ballot design and could propose legislation to that effect.
If the legislature does indeed move forward with some form of ballot design overhaul, that may override the terms of the settlements that counties have agreed to, which dictate that county clerks are “relieved from [the settlements’] obligations” if “the New Jersey legislature passes legislation that supersedes, amends, or replaces the statutory provisions that are the subject of this litigation, such that compliance with new such legislation and terms of this order would be impossible.”
This story was updated at 2:56 p.m. to include the latest settlement in Atlantic County.