In a scathing rebuke of New Jersey’s political establishment, Assembly candidate Katie Brennan slammed a newly introduced ballot design bill as yet another shameless attempt to manipulate voters, rig elections, and protect the powerful at the expense of democracy.
The proposed legislation, S4142, would grant county clerks sweeping authority to group candidates together on the ballot, creating glaring advantages for establishment-backed candidates while relegating independents and challengers to the electoral wilderness.
Lawmakers found themselves rewriting the law governing ballot design after a federal judge ordered the decades-old system to be scrapped for the Democratic primary last year.
Brennan, who told the Wall Street Journal she had been sexually assaulted by a senior official on Murphy’s first campaign for governor in 2017 when she was a volunteer, did not mince words, calling the bill a direct assault on the principles of democracy and a slap in the face to New Jersey voters.
“This proposal is another attempt to rig the ballot, manipulate voters, and make it harder for challengers to run against those already in power,” said Brennan. “Instead of designing a fair ballot that lists each name the same way, this would create new visual cues and advantages for candidates running together on the same slate. This isn’t fair to independent candidates like myself, and it certainly isn’t fair to voters who deserve a real choice over who represents them.”
The bill, under consideration by New Jersey lawmakers, is the latest chapter in the state’s long history of undemocratic ballot design practices.
For decades, New Jersey’s unique “county line” system has allowed political power brokers to stack the deck in favor of their chosen candidates, placing them in prime ballot real estate while banishing challengers to what activists have dubbed “ballot Siberia.”
This rigged system, which a federal judge recently struck down as unconstitutional, has been a cornerstone of New Jersey’s political machine, ensuring that incumbents and establishment favorites face little to no competition.
Brennan’s outrage is shared by a coalition of grassroots organizations across the state, including Action Together New Jersey, Indivisible NJ, and Our Revolution New Jersey, who have long fought to dismantle the county line system.
These groups argued that the ballot design confuses voters and creates an insurmountable advantage for establishment candidates.
Antoinette Miles, the director of the New Jersey Working Families Party, said the Senate bill is a “further regression.”
“It just opens up this can of worms that could open up the floodgates for more voter confusion,” Miles said.
A Rutgers University study found that appearing on the county line gave candidates an average 35-point boost in the 2020 primary—a staggering advantage that has effectively shut out challengers for decades.
Josh Pasek, a researcher who was an expert witness in the federal lawsuit that ended the previous ballot rigging system, said candidate grouping would be the “lowest hanging fruit” for a lawsuit since candidates grouped together would have a higher chance of being listed first on the ballot, which is advantageous.
Advocates also argue that grouping could confuse voters who don’t realize the positions are elected separately.
“This is sort of the ‘change is hard’ moment for the legislature,” Miles said. The New Jersey Working Families Party filed a lawsuit over the county line in 2020.
The Senate bill also gets rid of font guidelines created by the Assembly in conjunction with the Center for Civic Design. It also assigns letters and numbers to candidate ballot positions reminiscent of the way county parties would direct voters on which boxes to vote for.
In addition to layout changes, the bill removes state party committee members from the ballot. If the bill becomes law, the members would be appointed by county committees instead of being directly elected by primary election voters.
“All other states structure their primary ballots around the position being sought, with candidates listed beneath or to the side of that position,” the Good Government Coalition of New Jersey explained.
“This ballot design makes it easy for voters to tell who is running for which office. The majority of New Jersey’s counties, on the other hand, structure their primary ballots around a ‘county line,’ a list of party-endorsed candidates for each of the positions that appears as a horizontal or vertical column and that has prime location on the ballot,” said the Good Government Coalition. “Candidates who are not endorsed by the party can end up multiple columns away, in what has come to be known as ‘ballot Siberia.’”
“A healthy and high-quality participatory democracy requires that every citizen has an equal and effective vote. Further, all voters should be able to express their preferences easily and have confidence that every effort has been made to record and count those preferences accurately,” said Lisa Van Theemsche, a representative for the Center for Science and Democracy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Unfortunately, poor ballot design hampers citizens’ ability to express their preferences. Conversely, effective ballot design can lower ballot rejection rates, decrease the number of ballots that require curing, decrease the time it takes to vote, increase voter turnout, and ensure that every voter’s ballot is counted, regardless of race, economic status, age, ability, or language,” said Van Theemsche.