Gloucester elections are a mess, and the judge isn’t sure what to do

The next steps after a small-town South Jersey council candidate was kicked off the Democratic primary ballot after voting had already begun have a Superior Court judge and election lawyers struggling to sort out what happens next.

What Judge Benjamin Telsey learned today from Gloucester County election officials is that the ripple effect of disqualifying Paulsboro Councilman Eric Singleton’s nominating petitions last week is complicated and disrupts the counting of votes countywide.

The attorney for Councilman Tahje Thomas, who filed the initial challenge to Singleton’s petition, and he and Michael Maley, the attorney for Paulsboro Borough Clerk Elsie Tedeski, had agreed that any vote-by-mail ballots cast for Singleton would be counted as write-in votes, and that the voting machines would be fixed in time for the June 2 primary – or more imminently, the start of in-person early voting on May 26.

Invalidating roughly 317 Democratic primary ballots that have already been mailed and sending out new ones is impracticable, according to Gloucester County Counsel Eric Campo.  He said the time required for the clerk to redesign ballots, for the election machine vendor, ES&S, to reprogram the machines, and for the printer to reprint and address the ballots would be about one week.  Campos estimated that it would take another 5-7 days for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the ballots to Paulsboro.

“They will have to match with the new ballot because you won’t be able to tally them in the scanning system if the ballots don’t match up,” said Campo. “So they from what we’re told by the vendor, we’re not going to be able to tally that.”

Campo said this is an “all or nothing type of deal” and that ballots would need to be redone completely.

“One has to line up with the other,” he said.  “Or else it can’t be tallied.”

The Gloucester County Clerk was not involved in this matter until today and has no responsibility for the mistakes.  Telsey still has not ordered the Gloucester County Board of Elections to be notified, even though they are the ones who count the votes.

According to the County Clerk’s office, two write-in votes have already been cast by vote-by-mail.

The county rejected the idea of an all-provisional ballot election in Paulsboro only.

Deputy County Clerk Heather Poole said over 11,000 ballots need to be tested if the machines are reprogrammed at this point.

Maley didn’t appear to understand the scope of how Paulsboro effects other candidates for other offices in every municipality in Gloucester County.

“Aren’t we only reprogramming like, you know, a dozen machines for Paulsboro and like just testing those ballots,” Maley asked.

But Joseph Gangloff, who runs technology for the county clerk’s office, told Telsey that any change, no matter how minor, affects the central database of the entire election.

Everything needs to be tested. One, one small change,” Gangloff said.  “We have to test everything.”

Telsey spent the first eight minutes of a nearly one-hour case management conference explaining how the delays were not his fault.  He blamed Thomas’ attorney, Michael DiPiero, for not including an order to show cause with his initial filing, for not listing the proper court code, and for not emailing the actual petitions to his courthouse chambers. – in apparent violation of an order he issued on October 27, 2025.  He also blamed the Paulsboro municipal clerk for getting the law wrong – something he needed to fix.

The challenge was filed on April 6, but Telsey didn’t schedule a hearing until April 17.  He gave the attorneys ten days to file briefs and left three days for him to read them.  When he held his hearing on April 30, twelve days had already passed since VBMs went in the mail.  Then it took Telsey until today to hold a case management conference.

Telsey will hold another case management conference at 2:30 PM today.