It’s primary voting season again, which means most New Jerseyans are going to robotically mark the boxes next to the candidates running down the left-hand column on their ballots – all stacked up, like pearls on a string -- and give scant notice to the names clinging to the opposite side of our touch screens.
It makes little sense, but that’s Jersey politics: If you have the party’s endorsement in a primary, you get to join the “party line,” you benefit from the ballot dictated by the county’s political machine, and your opponents get banished to what is known as ballot Siberia.
Other than those county bosses and their anointed ballot beloveds, everyone recognizes this arcane system as an insult to democracy, and thankfully some intrepid candidates and New Jersey Working Families are getting the chance to prove it in court. Most experts agree that it could change Jersey politics forever, and we should all hope that’s the case.
A federal judge last week gave the green light for a lawsuit to proceed against county clerks, which argues that the bracketed ballot design used in primaries is unconstitutional. District Judge Zahid Quraishi, a recent appointee by President Biden, acknowledged the gravitas of his decision, noting that “It is the Court’s duty and imperative to protect the democratic process.”
Bravo. It’s time somebody did that, because the ballot used in 19 of New Jersey’s 21 counties is not democracy. It is a mechanism that has been rigged to protect the machine’s candidate.
Consider this: No state legislator has lost a primary since 2009. And no congressional incumbent has lost a primary in half a century.
The reason is ballot placement. Research shows that the voter’s attention is focused on the names placed in the first or second column, particularly if they are bundled under all the party-endorsed candidates. Those candidates – whether they are running for town council or dog catcher – become especially formidable if their names are bracketed beneath a political brand like Gov. Phil Murphy or Sen. Cory Booker.
Candidates that don’t have the party’s backing are placed in columns on the right, making them appear less legitimate. Often, there are empty spaces above and below their names. Sometimes, multiple candidates for the same office are jammed into the same box, which could lead to voters choosing both and invalidating their ballot.
There is a term for the cognitive bias that makes us choose Column 1 -- the “primacy effect,” they call it. And the consequences of favorable placement are very real. A New Jersey Policy Perspective report found that in the 2020 primaries, the difference between having the party line versus not having the party line, on average, was roughly 35%. In short, challengers who run off the line -- without organizational backing -- almost always lose.
No other state tolerates such a corrupt configuration. Most states simply group the names of candidates under the office that they seek, and those names are randomized or alphabetized to ensure fairness, with no attempts at deception.
But in New Jersey, the party chairmen and county committees believe that voters should defer to their wisdom, because they know the best candidates for their turf, they raise the money, and they build the volunteer base -- all true -- and the clerks design the ballots accordingly. The system works very well for them, and candidates throw piles of money at the state and county committees to secure their space in Column 1. The higher the office, the higher the pile.
Remove the party line from the ballot, and that changes. Its elimination restores some sanity and fairness, for starters: Jesse Burns of the League of Women Voters of New Jersey, which filed an amicus brief supporting the suit, does not exaggerate when she calls the line “a voter suppression tactic, used to pre-determine elections outcomes and diminish the voice of voters.”
We cannot expect all party bosses and elected officials to acknowledge the cracks in the existing system and embrace reform, however, because they would rather eat a raw wolverine. Unless there is a settlement, we’re headed for many months of discovery and depositions, and it could be years before this case gets through the courts. But for the sake of restoring democracy, it will be worth the wait.
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