For the first time in decades, the ballot design that helped political bosses cement their power over New Jersey politics won’t be used by either party in next month’s crowded primary election for governor.
But the progressives who shocked the state’s political world by ending the so-called county line a year ago now say they’re worried some aspects of it could return — and that only a federal court ruling will kill it off forever. Without that, the left-leaning Democrats say, New Jersey’s entrenched powers will do everything they can to chip away at truly open primaries.
A long-running legal battle over the line’s constitutionality continues to play out in federal court, with lawyers for the progressive plaintiffs — who include Democratic Sen. Andy Kim and the New Jersey Working Families Party — calling for a final decision on the matter. But two county clerks and one local party organization — all Democrats — remain opposed.
“The county line system is part of our political past,” Kim said in a statement. “I want to make sure it’s understood to be unconstitutional so it will never come back.”
For decades, county party-endorsed primary candidates in most New Jersey counties were placed in the same row or column of the ballot, from president to local council member and even the neighborhood Democratic committee member. Rival candidates running without a slate of allies often found themselves pushed into obscure parts of the ballot known as “ballot Siberia.” Those ballot placements often virtually determined election outcomes, giving the party leaders enormous sway with their endorsements.
That came to an end in the 2024 Democratic Senate primary following Kim’s lawsuit, which largely mirrored but quickened a slow-moving 2020 suit by several unsuccessful Democratic candidates. U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi in March 2024 issued a preliminary injunction barring the line, but only for the Democrats.
In response to the decision, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in March signed a new ballot design law that mandates primary candidates from both parties be grouped by office sought instead of establishment party support and barred county clerks from separating candidates from others running for the same office. But opponents of the line are concerned that future legislation could chip away at the law’s anti-line provisions and that local officials will find loopholes in the law that could be avoided with clear court precedent.
“The legislation went a very far way in making sure we don’t vet the worst features of the county line,” said Antoinette Miles, executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Party. “But if we want to make sure we never go back to the same tricks and ballot manipulation we saw with the county line, we need a final court decision.”
The absence of the line has played a big role in creating one of the most competitive Democratic gubernatorial primaries in years. Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s support from some of the most powerful Democratic organizations in the state, including Essex and Middlesex counties, would normally make her the overwhelming favorite.
Instead, Sherrill is the narrow front-runner, with her five rivals — Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, former state Senate President Steve Sweeney and New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller — all having at least somewhat realistic paths to the nomination. (The Republican primary for governor is less crowded and, based on limited public polling, less competitive.)
The line itself was a big issue in last year’s Senate primary leading up to the law abolishing it. Fulop and Baraka came out aggressively against it, while Gottheimer helped hook Middlesex County Democrats up with a prominent attorney who briefly sought to defend it.
Months before New Jersey enacted the new law, most of the county clerks who were defendants in the case settled and agreed to get rid of the line. But the Bergen and Union county clerks have refused to settle, while the Camden County Democratic Committee — the dominant party in the county responsible for some of the most egregious examples of ballot design that favored the party-backed candidates — continues to back them in court.
The two clerks’ attorneys argued in a recent court filing that the plaintiffs keep pressing the case because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that they’re entitled to legal fees from their adversaries only if they win a final ruling. The clerks, who said that the other 17 county clerks who settled had paid approximately $500,000 in legal fees to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, don’t want to pay.
“Plaintiffs seek to permanently enjoin a law that is no longer on the books because the Union and Bergen County Clerks had the temerity not to agree to use county taxpayer dollars to pay Plaintiffs’ counsel’s fees for having simply followed State law as it existed at the time,” they wrote.
The Camden County Democratic Committee argued the case is moot and that the original plaintiffs aren’t harmed in part because they no longer had a personal stake in the outcome. The defendants never had a chance to depose the plaintiffs’ witnesses who testified in favor of a preliminary injunction, they said, and that Quraishi’s initial decision harms them because it applied only to Democrats, not Republicans.
But the Camden County Democrats went even further, continuing to argue that grouping candidates together by party endorsement is their constitutional right.
“Imposing limitations on political party organizations who wish to band together, i.e., bracket, while placing no restrictions on individuals acting alone, i.e., unbracketed, is a restraint on a political party organization’s freedom of association,” reads their brief.
The plaintiffs, who alleged that the county clerks are effectively outsourcing the constitutional arguments in the case to the Camden County Democrats, say there’s much more at stake than legal fees.
They argued ballot design law did not entirely follow Quraishi’s initial decision, including by allowing candidates running for multi-seat offices like state Assembly and county commissioner to “bracket,” and that some clerks’ ballot designs for this primary “don’t conform with the spirit and intent of this Court’s prior rulings” or even the new law. They noted that on the Cherry Hill ballot, the Camden County Clerk provided just one oval to vote for an entire slate of 74 Democratic committee candidates instead of allowing voters to pick each candidate, which they said violates the law’s “express mandate that every candidate have an oval or box next to their own name.” (The clerk’s office said that listing each candidate with an oval next to their names would make it impossible to fit on a single page of paper.)
Yael Bromberg, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said a final judgment is “necessary to protect current and future voting rights in the state.”
“It’s time to put an end to the splurge of taxpayer-funded defense of a 75-year old ballot design which enabled a politics of exclusion and soft corruption, and turn a new page for democracy in New Jersey,” Bromberg said.
Attorney Angelo Genova, who represents Union County, declined to comment, while attorney Bill Tambussi, who represents the Camden County Democrats, did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.
Even the full return of the county line, while unlikely due to the state law, is not completely out of the question. Republican county parties sat on the sidelines during the battle over the line, but there’s been chatter among county GOP chairs about backing an effort to bring back the county line, despite the new state law outlawing it. Morris County Republican Chair Laura Ali, who leads the association of 21 New Jersey GOP chairs, acknowledged to POLITICO that she’d like to bring back the line but wants to wait for the outcome of the primary before discussing it in detail with other party leaders.
“After the election at our next meeting I’m sure we’ll all discuss the outcome of the election and the benefits of the ballot in its current format … and we’ll go from there,” Ali said.
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