The air in Roselle is thick with the acrid stench of a democracy rotting from the inside out, a low and expensive hum of legal machinery grinding away not for justice, but for the vanity of a single politician.
At the center of this foul opera is Councilwoman Denise Wilkerson, a woman who would rather see the entire temple of civic trust burned to the ground than admit she might have walked through a door left ajar by incompetence.
Her two-vote “victory” in June—a margin so thin it would be a rounding error in any honest accounting—was not a mandate.
It was a statistical anomaly, a ghost of a win that was immediately haunted by the very real specter of the citizens who were turned away at the polls, their rights trampled by the same bureaucratic indifference that has long plagued this state.
Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which eliminated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, many states enacted measures that disproportionately affect voters of color, young people, and the elderly.
Trump and his allies targeting ballots in cities with large Black populations have presented no real evidence of widespread voter fraud or other impropriety in any of these cities, but the persistence of the Republicans has alarmed Black leaders, civil rights activists, and historians who see an unprecedented attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.
Amid this chaotic maelstrom on a national level, in tiny Roselle, more voters were disenfranchised by bungling poll workers than the number of votes that separated Wilkerson from her opponent, Democratic Councilwoman Cynthia Johnson. Let that grotesque arithmetic sink in.
But Wilkerson does not deal in arithmetic; she deals in avarice.
Faced with a judicial order that rightly nullified an election tainted by these civil rights violations, she did not bow to the simple, painful truth.
Instead, she has launched a scorched-earth legal campaign, a selfish and staggering expense on the taxpayers she claims to represent, all to claw back a title that was never legitimately hers.
She has now asked the New Jersey Supreme Court to perform a miracle, to overrule not one, but two courts and the entire Union County Board of Elections, to bless this farce with the holy water of high authority.
“I thank God for an opportunity to fight this further,” she said, a blasphemous invocation that would make a preacher weep.
“Wilkerson wants the New Jersey Supreme Court to overrule an appellate court judge, Superior Court Judge John Deitch, the Roselle Democratic Municipal Committee, and the Union County Board of Elections, by allowing her to be the general election candidate after her two-vote victory in the June primary for a borough council seat was invalidated because many citizens were not allowed to vote,” said a Roselle resident who claims she voted for the incumbent. “She is wasting public funds on a vanity project, holding the entire electoral process hostage while ballots go unprinted and letting the democratic will of the people be supplanted.”
“I won’t be voting for the whining, entitled politician again,” she added. “My vote will go to someone who is working to solve my problems and those of our community.”
Almost nobody stands with Wilkerson in her quixotic and costly crusade?
The silence from her closest ally, Mayor Donald Shaw, is deafening. The Elizabeth homeowner who spent time inside a Rikers Island cell for pushing heroin now seems to find no moral compass when it comes to a narrative that poisons the well of democracy itself.
His quiet complicity is a testament to the kind of backroom politics where principles are traded for power and the public purse is treated as a personal slush fund.
This is not about justice. This is not about the “will of the people.”
This is about a politician who views a failed system not as a tragedy to be fixed, but as a casino to be exploited.
She is gambling with your money, and the community is crumbling all around us.
The legal bills pile up, the courts are bogged down, and the people of Roselle are left with nothing but a bill for a fight they never asked for, a fight that serves only one person: Denise Wilkerson.
She isn’t fighting for her seat; she’s fighting for her ego, and she’s sending the invoice to every Roselle taxpayer.