We finally got rid of the so-called “county line,” in which the candidates favored by party bosses got a privileged spot on the ballot in New Jersey. So now that it’s gone, how will the overlords cope?
Just fine, it turns out, with Essex County taking center stage for its latest act of magic. The endorsed candidates are still getting coveted spots, just by the luck of the draw, nearly every time.
Imagine that.
In all four boxes on the ballot in the recent 11th district primary, the boss-backed candidates won the top spot in a supposedly random drawing– for which the odds are just 4.2%. And that’s not all. In Democrat-run Essex County, Democrats have also repeatedly won the most prominent spot on the general election ballot in a random draw, 17 times in a row.
There are only two possibilities here, folks. One is that Essex County’s party bosses are extremely blessed, and have defied the odds in miraculous fashion, year after year. The other is that they cheat regularly.
The Democratic clerk responsible for these drawings, Christopher Durkin, insists that the candidates won these top spots fair and square in the 11th district primary, and every one of those 17 times in the general election. There’s really no explanation for this that could pass the smell test, but he gave it his all.
Does it bother him that people are saying the drawings were rigged? “It does very much.” Does he see why we are skeptical that the Democrats won 17 times in a row? “Each ballot drawing is separate and unto itself.” Could it be possible to rig a drawing like this? “I wouldn’t know if it was possible.”
Let’s pause for a moment here to describe the process. The names of the candidates are written on pieces of paper that get inserted into a plastic capsule about the size of a pill case. The capsules then go inside a drum that gets tumbled and shook, and are drawn out one at a time, as in Bingo. The public is invited to watch, and it all gets filmed.
But how do we know that a clerk isn’t scratching a capsule, leaving it slightly ajar, or freezing it so that it feels cold to the touch, and then easily plucking it out? All ideas that election lawyers have shared with us.
After an interminable silence, Durkin said only, “The strips of paper with the names of the candidates and the capsules are in plain view of the public, for them to inspect.” Right.
But the public isn’t allowed to actually touch these capsules, we are told. That might ruin the ol’ razzle dazzle.
So we called up the chair of the Democratic State Committee, LeRoy Jones, whose son, Amir Jones, was among the four boss-backed candidates who randomly got top ballot spots in the Essex primary; in his case, for county sheriff. “I don’t entertain cheating,” Jones told us, “because that’s not anything that I’ve ever been associated with in my life.”
Besides, he said, the public gets to witness the drawing and can object if they see anything inappropriate. “I don’t think there’s been objections,” he told us. Really?
What about the lawsuit filed just last year in his home county, by a Republican who complained about this exact thing— losing the top spot 17 years in a row?
The lawyer, Giancarlo Ghione, filed suit over these “ridiculous statistical odds” on the day of last year’s drawing, but the judge ruled they didn’t have enough evidence of foul play. Then, the Essex County clerk remarked to him and his client, “I think you guys are going to be happy with how this drawing goes,” Ghione recalled.
Durkin stuck his hand inside the box for about 10 seconds, shuffled it around, and lo and behold, Republicans got the top spot for the first time in 17 years. Amazing.
“I’m not familiar with any lawsuit,” Jones, the state and Essex County Democratic chair, told us.
You see why experts who study this absurd system wonder why we are sticking with it. “It’s kind of ridiculous that we’re still having a clerk draw names out of a drum when there are computers that could randomize this in a much more scientific way, and would be cheating-proof, essentially,” says Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers professor who’s researched this. The order of the candidates could be randomized by voting precinct, too.
There’s just zero reason for us to still be doing it this way, and for our county clerks to have a partisan affiliation, she notes. “The fact that they have historically run on the county line means that they are very, very vulnerable to the wishes of the county party chair,” she told us. “That unnecessarily politicizes and makes partisan their position and gives them a real incentive to cheat.”
But Democratic chairman Jones tell us he prefers the current system. He likes the public participation and that it’s filmed, and argues that even with technology, we’d still be debating, “did somebody, you know, program the computer to do something.” “I like the human approach,” he said.
No doubt the other party bosses do, too. Clearly, they’re not going to go down quietly, and this is just a preview. The machines will try to stay as close to the line as they can, so it’s our move now. Let’s fight back with smart ballot reforms, and make this less like a seedy game on the boardwalk.
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