New Jersey’s Ballot Must Be Immediately Redesigned, Federal Judge Rules

In a landmark ruling, a federal judge on Friday ordered New Jersey to redesign its election ballot before the June primary, upending a long-standing source of electoral power for the state’s Democratic and Republican political machines.

The decision by Judge Zahid Quraishi of U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey is expected to fundamentally reshape politics in New Jersey.

“The integrity of the democratic process for a primary election is at stake,” Quraishi wrote in a 49-page decision.

Candidates who had sued to request a redesign of the ballot had proved that “their constitutional rights are violated by the present ballot design,” he added.

At issue is the unique way New Jersey designs its primary election ballots, a system that gives a significant advantage to establishment candidates at the expense of outsiders. In most counties, the ballots bracket together candidates in the same column based on endorsements by political party leaders, rather than grouping candidates together based on the office for which they are running.

The implications of Quraishi’s decision have loomed over a high-stakes race to replace Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who is accused of accepting bribes in exchange for political favors.

Rep. Andy Kim, a Democrat running for Menendez’s seat, had made concerns over the ballot’s fairness a defining theme of the race, and last month, he joined with two other candidates to file a lawsuit that led to Friday’s judicial decision.

“It’s a victory built from the incredible grassroots work of activists across our state who saw an undemocratic system marginalizing the voices of voters, and worked tirelessly to fix it,” Kim said about the ruling.

For months, Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Philip Murphy, was Kim’s main Senate opponent. Murphy’s path to victory was heavily dependent on the support of influential Democratic Party bosses who had ties to her husband and enough clout to ensure that her name would appear in the preeminent spot on the June 4 primary ballot in the state’s most populous counties.

Murphy dropped out of the race Sunday, but the legal battle over the ballot’s design — a banal but fundamental component of electoral power in New Jersey — continued to dominate the political discussion in the state.

Quraishi’s decision unleashed a chorus of cheers, congratulatory selfies and at least one pop-up cocktail party from New Jersey residents who for years had fought to abolish the ballot design.

Yael Bromberg, one of a group of lawyers who in 2020 filed the first lawsuit seeking to overturn the current ballot design, called Quraishi’s decision a “landmark win for fair elections.”

“Voters will finally have a meaningful choice,” said Antoinette Miles, who leads the state chapter of Working Families, a left-leaning group that collected donations from supporters to help pay for the original legal action. “Candidates, no matter their background, will finally be able to enter politics on their own terms. And we will finally have a system where officials are accountable to the voters rather than to the preferences of party insiders.”

In 19 of the state’s 21 counties, local political leaders have for decades clustered their preferred candidates for every office in a prominent row or column on primary ballots — a position that in New Jersey is known simply as “the line.” Primary challengers’ names appear off to the side or at the ballot’s edge, a spot candidates call “ballot Siberia.”

Candidates whose names appear on the county line typically win. This has enabled county political leaders to use ballot position to reward or punish candidates, encouraging fealty. It also gives them outsize control over policy decisions, jobs and government contracts while simultaneously diminishing constituents’ ability to sway elections and hold elected officials accountable.

Kim had asked Quraishi to instead require election officials to display the names of all the candidates running for each open position together in a discrete section of the ballot, as is done in the other 49 states.

On Friday, the judge agreed to do just that.

The county political parties and elected clerks, who are responsible for designing and printing the ballots, had enlisted dozens of lawyers — most of whom were being paid with taxpayer dollars — to strenuously defend the practice that Kim argued was unconstitutional.

The extraordinary nature of Quraishi’s ruling was laid plain in the flurry of legal responses and defiant news releases that were sent in the hours after the decision.

The Morris County Republican Committee wrote to Quraishi to indicate that it interpreted his ruling to apply only to Democratic primaries on June 4. A bipartisan group of legislative leaders warned that they believed any change to the ballot should be left to the state Legislature — not the courts.

Then, late Friday, Rajiv D. Parikh, a lawyer who represents county clerks, formally requested that the judge delay implementation of his decision, pending an appeal to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Implementing an entirely new style of ballot in five business days presents an undue risk to the administration of this year’s primary elections,” Parikh wrote to Quraishi on behalf of 15 of the state’s county clerks.

Parikh acknowledged, however, that he faced “a high bar” to win the delay he was requesting.

In testimony during a daylong hearing in Quraishi’s courtroom, Kim, 41, argued that he risked irreparable harm if the ballot were not redesigned before the primary.

Hours before the hearing March 18, the state’s attorney general, Matthew Platkin, a Democrat and longtime ally of the governor, wrote to Quraishi that he agreed the ballot design was unconstitutional.

Murphy dropped out of the race a week later.

Lawyers for county political leaders, hoping to salvage their ballot-design advantage, argued that the urgency of Kim’s request had vanished with Murphy’s decision to exit the race.

Quraishi called this argument “specious at best.”

The decision is expected to usher in seismic changes in New Jersey, where political bosses have often appeared impervious to voter sentiment.

Just this week, Sal Bonaccorso, the Republican mayor of Clark, New Jersey, who was recorded in 2020 using racial slurs and later charged by Platkin with unrelated crimes, was awarded the party’s prominent ballot position as he runs for reelection.

Studies by professors from Rutgers and Princeton universities have shown that the county line gives candidates an often insurmountable advantage.

One analysis by Julia Sass Rubin, an associate dean at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Policy at Rutgers, found that being on the county line gave congressional candidates an advantage of 38 percentage points.

Kim’s lawsuit also included a real-time experiment showing the effect of the ballot’s design by Josh Pasek, a University of Michigan professor who has written books about voter behavior. Pasek distributed sample ballots to more than 600 New Jersey Democratic voters but alternated the location in which Kim’s, Murphy’s and other candidates’ names appeared.

He concluded that the county line “strongly nudged” voters toward specific candidates.

The Democratic mayors of Newark and Jersey City, the state’s two largest cities, had called for an end to the county-line ballot design. Both mayors are campaigning for the Democratic nomination to run for governor next year and applauded the judge’s decision.

“‘The line’ is, and has always been, anti-democratic,” said Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor. “We as a party have always known it was wrong, and yet we lived with it for decades.”

Steven Fulop, Jersey City’s mayor, called the judge’s decision a “victory for the people.”

“New Jersey has taken a major step forward today to a fairer, more representative electoral system and away from the political bossism and corruption that has plagued our state for too long,” Fulop said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .