Are New Jersey Voters Too Dumb for Normal Ballots?
A federal judge has ordered Democrats in New Jersey to draw up ballots fairly instead of putting their favorite candidates at the front. But state Democratic bosses think that voters can’t be trusted to figure out how to think for themselves.
Somerset County Democratic Committee Chair Peg Schaffer complained to Politico that it will “cost us more money” to tell voters what to do. “Instead of saying to people ‘vote column 1’ we’re going to have to send them a color-coded card saying where everybody is on the ballot,” said Schaffer, who is also the statewide Democratic vice chair.
Hudson County Democratic Organization Chairman Anthony Vainieri Jr., meanwhile, argued that new voting machines were already straining voters’ brains, so a non-rigged ballot would just be too confusing.
“If [the judge] was acting to abolish the party lines he should have done it for next year, not this year, because we need more time to educate our voters and for the county clerks to redesign the ballots,” he said in a Friday statement. “Residents in Hudson County are still trying to get used to the new voting machines installed last year, especially our seniors, and this is absolutely the wrong time to force such a drastic change on our voters.”
Bear in mind that every other state in America already uses the ballots that Schaffer and Vaineiri are complaining about. Under New Jersey’s unique “county line” system, party bosses in each county can choose which candidates go in the first column of primary ballots. Other candidates are exiled to “ballot Siberia,” their names scattered “helter-skelter” across the ballot.
Being in the first column gives candidates an average advantage of about 38 percentage points, according to an analysis submitted to the court by Princeton University neuroscience professor Samuel S.-H. Wang, who calls the county line a “powerful force to steer voter behavior towards specific choices.”
U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi issued a temporar
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