The New Jersey Senate introduced a new ballot design bill critics say is a step backward

The New Jersey state Senate on Thursday introduced a ballot redesign bill that critics said undermines the effort to create a fairer voting ticket.

The new Senate bill, which was obtained by The Inquirer, gives county clerks broad discretion over how to group candidates on the ballot who choose to run together for offices with multiple seats. The move is an expansion of a measure in the Assembly’s ballot design bill that passed in December that fair ballot advocates argue mirrors the very problem a new ballot design is meant to solve.

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.

Lawmakers found themselves rewriting the rules of the ballot after a federal judge ordered the decades-old ballot to be redone for the Democratic primary last year, deeming a feature of the layout called the county line likely unconstitutional. The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Democratic Sen. Andy Kim and then-Democratic congressional candidates Sarah Schoengood and Carolyn Rush, who argued in court that the county line gave preferential treatment to candidates favored by party leaders by grouping them together in a prominent position while violating the rights of other candidates by placing their names on more obscure portions of the ballot.

The new ballot design will organize candidates by office, not endorsement, but a major sticking point is whether it’s fair for allied candidates to be grouped together who are running for an office like Assembly, which has two members per district but are elected separately.

The Assembly design allowed allied candidates to be placed together on the ballot one after another, and the Senate bill allows them to be listed even closer together or presented in the same box.

Kim told reporters last week that grouping candidates poses the same issue he argued against in challenging the county line in court — that it pressures people to associate with another candidate to get better placement on the ballot.

“It’s totally fine for incumbents to run, and they can run as running mates in their campaign, but it shouldn’t be on the ballot,” he said. “Like, just run your campaign.”

Josh Pasek, a researcher who was an expert witness in Kim’s lawsuit, 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 joined a lawsuit over the county line in 2021.

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 instead be appointed by county committees.

Kim said last week he wasn’t particularly hopeful that state senators would make positive changes to the Assembly’s bill — which he was displeased with — and said he didn’t feel the need to lobby senators since he’s made his position known.

“I made it known that, you know, I didn’t like where things landed,” he said. " … that’s going to be something that I’ll keep in my mind in terms of how I engage in future races and other things across New Jersey.”