A Superior Court Judge today sided with the George Norcross-allied Camden County Democratic Committee and ordered 71 organization-backed candidates for county committee seats in Cherry Hill to join three progressives who won the June 10 primary.
Cherry Hill elects its county committee members at large in a winner-take-all contest, where a single vote is cast for the entire slate. A South Jersey Progressive Democrats slate of three – Susan Druckenbrod, Rena Margulis, and Dave Stahl – received 5,547 votes; the 74-member party-endorsed slate won 3,350.
“This looks like a tie to me. There were two ties. There was a tie for first or a tie for second and third, and it was a tie for fourth through seventy-fourth,” said Judge Michael Kassel. “It’s a perfect fit with (the statute), but it’s close enough.”
Kassel explained that he viewed his ruling as fair and equitable.
“You have 74 vacancies. You have 77 people who want to fill those 74 vacancies. Fair enough? It seems to me that the fairest thing to do is to give the top 74 vote-getters gets the job, so to speak. Somebody will finish first. Somebody finished 15th. Somebody finished 74th. The person who finishes 75th. 76. 77. They’re out of luck,” Kassel said. “It’s not a controversial position. It’s true. If you treat all 77 as a binary.”
With just three candidates, Kassel said, the progressive slate’s best-case scenario was to get three seats out of 74.
“They couldn’t expect four. They couldn’t expect 74. They ran three people. I’m not being critical; it’s just a fact. The other side ran 74,” the judge explained. “If it had gone the way that they hoped, all 74 would have been elected. It didn’t.”
Bill Tambussi, the counsel for the Camden County Democrats, noted that the bylaws of the Cherry Hill Democrats required a quorum of 30%, something that a panel of three couldn’t achieve
“They can’t have a quorum,” Tambussi said. “They can’t have a quorum to conduct business.”
But Yael Bromberg, the attorney for Druckenbrod, Margulis, Stahl, said she would appeal a ruling that gives the organization Democrats a 71-3 majority.
“That was clearly not the will of the voters. They voted for change,” Bromberg said. “And that vote for change did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in an ecosystem.”
Kassel issued a 45-day stay preventing the local Democrats from organizing, pending an appeal.
Attorney General Matt Platkin filed an amicus brief in support of the progressive slate, but no one from his office appeared in court today.