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Democrats would be assured of dominating Trenton for another term if the referendum is OKd.
New Jersey will vote on keeping gerrymandered map for two extra years
Jul 31 2020
Voters will decide in November whether the next redrawing of New Jersey's legislative districts may be postponed for two years.
It will be one of the more unusual referendums addressing partisan gerrymandering — and yet another wrinkle in the running of democracy wrought by the coronavirus.
Democrats who control the Legislature say keeping current districts in place until 2023 is the fairest thing to do if population reports from the Census Bureau are delayed, which looks likely because of the complications of counting heads in a pandemic. That's a subterfuge for holding on to their seats for an extra term, Republicans complain, while good-government groups say the postponement would deny growing minority populations more influence in Trenton.
<p>Legislators concluded the only way to get what they want was to ask the people to amend the state Constitution. The measure to put the language on the Nov. 3 ballot was cleared Thursday.</p><p>The timetable is unusually tight in New Jersey, because it's one of just two states that have legislative elections in 2021. (The other is Virginia, which will vote this fall on whether to assign redistricting to an independent panel, with its deadline for producing new maps not yet certain.)</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>If voters approve the measure, next year New Jersey will elect 120 legislators in the districts used since 2011 — assuming the census numbers are delivered after the middle of February. (Typically, the detailed data set is delivered by early March.) Lawmakers say this will provide the time needed to come up with fresh maps. </p><p>But that deadline is way too early, says the <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/princeton-gerrymandering-project" target="_self">Princeton Gerrymandering Project</a>, one of the groups opposed to the measure.</p><p>It would be possible to redraw the districts later and then delay the primary, which is usually in June, although maps drawn in the summer wouldn't leave much time to campaign in new territory for primaries in the early fall. Only a decade ago, when census results were late, the state responded by delaying the primary three weeks.</p><p>"This measure is unnecessary and it's extreme," said Republican state Sen. Kip Bateman. "It's not about fairness or accuracy. It's about protecting incumbents and the majority party's two decades of control in the Legislature."</p><p>The Princeton group maintains that pushing back an election is better than delaying redistricting because the latter would mean diluted voting power for the state's Latino and Asian-American communities, which have grown a combined 20 percent — more than 400,000 people — over the last decade, enough to become players in electing more state senators and House members.</p><p>The state's 12 congressional districts are redrawn using a separate process that won't be affected by this measure, and don't need to be remade as quickly in any case.</p><p>New Jersey is one of eight states that use independent redistricting commissions to draw new maps each decade for both Congress and the state legislature. Six other states do so for just the legislature.</p>
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The May municipal elections in Paterson, N.J., have been plagued with allegations of election fraud.
Claim: New Jersey election officials threw out nearly 20 percent of mail-in ballots. Fact check: True
Jul 02 2020
Absentee Ballots are fine. A person has to go through a process to get and use them. Mail-In Voting, on the other h… https://t.co/jxcfkpUuMA— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump)1593397833.0
A tweet on June 28 by President Trump cited voter fraud in a New Jersey election in order to bolster his argument against mail-in voting. Trump claimed that nearly 20 percent of ballots in a special election for city council representatives were fraudulent.
The municipal election was held in May in Paterson, N.J., for several city council seats. It was among a handful of elections that Gov. Phil Murphy ordered be completed exclusively by mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic. To make the process easier, Murphy signed an executive order in March for ballots to be sent to all registered voters without the need for an application.
But claims of fraud began appearing in local media as early as election day.
According to a report by NPR, the fraud investigation began after the U.S. Postal Inspection Service informed local law enforcement that hundreds of mail-in ballots were stuffed inside a Paterson mailbox.
<p>More than 1,200 ballets were initially tossed due to issues with voter signatures and another 1,000 were dumped because the person who dropped off the ballots did not correctly fill out the envelope to indicate they were the "bearer" of the ballots. New Jersey law allows a "bearer" to collect and deliver up to three ballots per election; however, this right does not extend to candidates.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>Three months after the election, four men were charged by state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal with illegally collecting or possessing ballots, including two winning city council candidates. The nonprofit Paterson Press found that votes had been cast in the names of <a href="https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/paterson-press/2020/05/29/paterson-nj-election-included-ballots-out-towners-and-dead/5287985002/" target="_blank">three deceased individuals</a>. And another resident listed as having voted said she <a href="https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/corruption-allegations-keep-growing-in-paterson-vote-by-mail-election/2416111/" target="_blank">did not receive a vote-by-mail ballot</a>, according to NBC New York.</p><div id="a7013" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="cfacc477b1483886813b1dc6941962ae"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1277429217190428673" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Absentee Ballots are fine. A person has to go through a process to get and use them. Mail-In Voting, on the other h… https://t.co/jxcfkpUuMA</div> — Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump)<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/statuses/1277429217190428673">1593397833.0</a></blockquote></div><p>In total, election officials admitted that more than 3,000 mail-in ballots, about 19 percent of those submitted, were disqualified.</p>
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New Jersey primary
Jun 12 2020
New Jersey holds its congressional and presidential primaries (postponed from June 2). No state offices are contested this year.
sorbetto/Getty Images
Lawsuit aims to halt any more online voting in New Jersey
May 15 2020
New Jersey piloted a new online voting system for people with disabilities this week, but a lawsuit could stop the state from using it again.
Human rights activists and law school students are challenging the new voting system, arguing it's unfair to expose only one category of voters to significant risk their ballots will get hacked with impunity.
Using a special app to vote over the internet is denigrated by most cybersecurity experts, who say the threat of votes being compromised is hardly worth the convenience. Four federal technology, law enforcement and election agencies united behind a report this month bluntly warning states against adopting online voting because "ensuring ballot integrity and maintaining voter privacy is difficult, if not impossible, at this time."
<p>New Jersey ran its first test of online voting in 33 local elections Tuesday. The system was only available for people with disabilities, who would have had difficulty casting ballots in contests that were otherwise conducted entirely by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic.</p><p>State officials have not yet indicated whether they will use the system for the presidential and congressional primaries, which have been postponed to July 7. But the lawsuit seeks to prevent them from doing so. The suit was filed Monday, hoping a state court would block internet voting the next day, but the judge did not set a hearing in time.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>Penny Venetis of Rutgers Law School sued on behalf of the human rights organization Coalition for Peace, its New Jersey affiliate and a state legislator. The lawsuit maintains the electronic voting system violates a 2010 court order that New Jersey conduct its elections in the traditional, offline manner.</p><p>The state has not announced its plans for allowing the app in the future and did not say how many used it this week.</p><p>The cloud-based system was developed by a Seattle-based company, <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting/online-voting-for-all-in-a-seattle-election-security-concerns-be-damned" target="_self">Democracy Live</a>. Delaware and West Virginia plan to allow disabled, military and overseas voters to use the same app this year. Officials there argue, as do those in New Jersey, that such a system is appropriate for those who cannot benefit from expanded vote-by-mail options during the public health crisis.</p><p>At a time of near total consensus that voting equipment is most secure when it relies on marking sheets of paper — or at a minimum generates a paper receipt a voter can double-check before submitting — internet-based voting heads in the opposite direction: Voters have no way to be sure their computers, phones or tablets haven't been compromised — and no way to trace their ballot into the cloud and watch it get captured accurately by vote counters.</p><p>New Jersey is also the state that, <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/louisiana-elections" target="_self">after Louisiana</a>, still relies the most on computerized voting machines that do not create any paper trail.</p>
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