A city council election in New Jersey's third biggest city was so tainted that it requires a do-over, a state judge has decided.
More than 3,000 ballots, or nearly 20 percent of all votes cast in Paterson's entirely vote-by-mail municipal election in May, were thrown out after evidence of tampering. Judge Ernest Caposela said Wednesday that means the contest "was not the fair, free and full expression of the intent of the voters" and must to be held anew in November
President Trump, who has repeatedly claimed without evidence that mail-in elections guarantee election rigging, has seized on the Paterson case — by far the most credible example of cheating this year — to sow further distrust in the way more people than ever will vote this year because of the pandemic. But election officials say that, on the contrary, the case actually shows how rare fraud is and how effectively the system catches the few perpetrators.
Following the state's first exclusively mail-in election in May, postal workers informed law enforcement officials that hundreds of ballots were stuffed inside a Paterson mailbox, prompting an investigation by Democratic state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal.
"We will not allow a small number of criminals to undermine the public's confidence in our democratic process," said Grewal, who charged four men, including two candidates, with fraud.
New Jersey officials also say Trump has mischaracterized what happened. The vast majority of the votes were rejected because they were improperly filled out, not because they were illegally cast.
Local news outlets reported problems with the vote as early as primary day, which election experts said speaks to the capability of the system to spot fraud.
"Even on this small scale, what you see is that having a conspiracy like this to try to affect the outcome of an election is very difficult to do without detection," Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told NPR.
The ruling comes a week after Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy announced that all 6.3 million registered voters would be sent a ballot so the November election can be conducted mainly by mail. The Trump campaign on Tuesday sued in federal court to stop the plan, claiming the governor has unconstitutionally altered election procedures that are the purview of the Legislature. The campaign has also sued Nevada, one of the four other states (plus D.C.) that like New Jersey have decided to switch to vote-by-mail for the first time because of Covid-19.
Murphy quickly fired back on Twitter, arguing that the Trump campaign was trying "to delegitimize our elections and cast doubt on our democratic process."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.