A small New Jersey beachside community’s move from one municipality to another is a victory for local residents who have been fighting for the change for decades – and a source of headaches for election administrators who have to figure out what to do with the community’s voters.
On March 30, the borough council in Seaside Park voted to officially annex South Seaside Park, a neighboring barrier island community of around 500 people that had previously been an exclave of Berkeley Township. South Seaside Park residents had been fighting for more than 50 years to remove themselves from Berkeley, a mainland township that was a nearly half-hour drive away without traffic, and were finally granted the opportunity to do so by the New Jersey Supreme Court last summer.
Plenty of logistical questions remain, such as how Berkeley Township will be compensated for its lost tax revenue and how municipal services will be handled in Seaside Park’s newest neighborhood. Perhaps the most time-sensitive of all, given that mail-in ballots for this year’s primary elections are just days away from being sent out: where will the voters of South Seaside Park vote?
Under current voting district boundaries, South Seaside Park is designated as Berkeley Township District 3B. The plan is to make it into a new voting district in Seaside Park, with commensurate county committeemembers and the ability to vote in local elections, but the clock is running out to make sure that takes effect for this year’s elections.
There’s also the question of which congressional and legislative districts the neighborhood will vote in, since Seaside Park and Berkeley are in different seats on both maps. The New Jersey Globe spoke with a number of Ocean County leaders and elections officials on what’s likely to happen, though some pieces of the puzzle remain in flux.
When it comes to congressional districts, at least, the answer appears relatively simple. South Seaside Park and the main portion of Seaside Park are located in different districts: the former is in Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis)’s 2nd district and the latter is in Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester)’s 4th district.
Because there are no limitations on municipality splits in congressional redistricting, there shouldn’t be any reason for anything to change; Seaside Park will now simply be one of the 17 towns that is split between multiple districts on the state’s House map. South Seaside Park will continue to vote in the 2nd district this year, just as it did in 2024 and 2022, and if mapmakers want to reunite Seaside Park into one district next decade, they can do so.
The state’s legislative map is a little more complicated, since by law municipalities can’t be split between districts unless they’re too large to fit into a single district, and Berkeley and Seaside Park are in different legislative districts (the former is in the 9th district, the latter in the 10th). The apparent solution: since South Seaside Park is now officially part of Seaside Park, it will automatically join the 10th district, which was drawn to include “Seaside Park” regardless of what the precise boundaries of the town were.
In fact, since the 9th district had around 5,000 more residents than the 10th as of the 2020 Census, the shift may make the districts’ populations more even rather than less. (New Jersey law requires districts to be of similar sizes, but allows for some deviation.)
How about municipal races? Two borough council seats in Seaside Park are up in 2026, and while neither Republicans nor Democrats are hosting a contested primary, there’s still the issue of making sure South Seaside Park voters are allowed to participate in that primary rather than continuing to be assigned to Berkeley, which doesn’t have a local election this year.
That’s complicated from a timing perspective, since mail-in ballots are set to start going out at the end of this week. There’s also one additional complicating factor: Pelican Island, a small 200-resident island located between the barrier island and the mainland that’s split between Toms River and Berkeley. The Berkeley section of the island is designated as District 3A and South Seaside Park is 3B, meaning that creating a new South Seaside Park voting district in Seaside Park would mean splitting that voting district into two pieces.
According to the Division of Elections, although splitting up the South Seaside Park-Pelican Island voting district this late would technically violate state statute, it’s an entirely defensible choice if it allows South Seaside Park residents to vote in Seaside Park elections this year.
That, more broadly, is a key dynamic when it comes to figuring out the answers to these questions: while state law provides certain guidelines for what should happen, there haven’t been any true annexations in more than a century, meaning that many of those laws are untested in modern times. If someone unhappy with one of the decisions made by elections officials takes it to court, it’s entirely possible that South Seaside Park’s status will be placed in the hands of a judge.
Other recent municipal boundary changes – such as the abolition of Pine Valley in 2022, Princeton Borough in 2013, and Pahaquarry in 1997 – involved one municipality absorbing another, a simpler procedure from an elections perspective. (Way back in 1894, Vailsburg seceded from South Orange, only to be annexed by Newark a decade later, a more comparable situation to the South Seaside Park switch.)
The partisan effect of the South Seaside Park-Seaside Park merger is likely to be minimal, since both areas are deeply Republican: South Seaside Park voted for Jack Ciattarelli by a 66%-34% margin last year, while Seaside Park went for Ciattarelli by a near-identical 67%-33%. South Seaside Park is also so small that its electorate barely makes a dent in congressional or legislative districts, which are each home to hundreds of thousands of people.
Local Seaside Park politics, though, is another story. The Seaside Park Borough Council may have welcomed South Seaside Park residents with open arms, but they’ll now have to face an electorate more than 40% larger than it was before, a daunting prospect for any elected official.
