the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, according to a NJ Spotlight analysis, New Jersey election officials did not count ballots for several reasons, often because of issues with signatures.About one in every 10 people who mailed in ballots in last month’s special elections had their votes rejected, which could forebode the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of New Jerseyans in next month’s primaries.
In Ridgewood 710 votes were rejected in our recent Board of Education, school budget and Village Council election.
Elections for nonpartisan municipal governing bodies, school boards and fire districts were held in 32 communities throughout New Jersey on May 12. All of these elections were conducted completely using mail-in ballots. About 17.4% of 684,375 ballots sent in 31 of the municipalities (no data was available for Old Bridge’s fire district election) were returned. Of 119,087 ballots returned, 11,453 or 9.6% were rejected.
As we have already reported a substantial portion of the rejected ballots were in Paterson, related to allegations of attempted voter fraud. The Passaic County Board of Elections decided not to count some 800 ballots for city council races after hundreds of ballots were found in bundles in mailboxes in Haledon and South Paterson. In total, more than 3,200 ballots cast in Paterson, or 19% of the total, were rejected.
Montclair also had many ballots go uncounted (1,100 ). Postal delays played at least some role, according to Renee Baskerville, who lost the mayoral contest by fewer than 200 votes and has filed a lawsuit in Superior Court seeking to have counted all votes that were properly cast.
There were many reasons for ballot rejections ,with the top three being , signature didn’t match 26.14% , ballot received too late 19.04% and of course, a very mysterious other 25.04% .
Isn’t that better than the number of rejected ballots in an actual voting 🗳 booth election?
i can’t feel sorry for the people who either mailed in their ballots at the last minute and were received late or failed to follow the instructions to sign the affidavit. ….
Village of Ridgewood has sued to stop the certification of the election, but Village of Ridgewood does not have the “right” to contest.
To contest need to either be someone who was running or a group of 15 or more electors.
Turns out the board incorrectly invalidated some 100 of the total of 700 invalid ballots.
More wasted legal fees!
Bergen Cty is actually one of the few counties to do elections well. It’ll be interesting to see the results of a review. Maybe some voters just screwed up, like Florida in 2000.
If the Village sued then we need to sue the Village for stupidity. What could they possibly hope to accomplish by wasting legal fees? Who ordered this? Oh wait…
We need to OPRA all communication between the Village, the Council and lawyers on who initiated this lawsuit and why they are contesting this.