the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, The Village of Ridgewood is suing the Bergen County Board of Elections for rejecting 710 ballots from May’s vote-by-mail election, demanding the county review the tossed votes, which could have substantially changed the election results. Ridgewood residents cast around 5,400 ballots last month. The Village claims that voters were not notified if their ballots were rejected, and village authorities were not informed about the disqualifications until June 5, three weeks after the election.
Interesting that the Village proclaimed the results on their website while the Ridgewood blog posted them but cautioned they were preliminary .
A day late a a dollar short the Village appears to be more upset over Board of Education budget cuts than voter disenfranchisement . According to the Bergen Record ,” Two of the three contests saw narrow margins: 137 votes separated the third-place village council candidate, who earned a seat, from the fourth-place candidate. The school budget was defeated by 127 votes — and the district’s board of education and the village council in early June agreed to cut $630,000 from the school budget as a result.”
Village Attorney Matt Rogers says it all, “The verification of the rejected vote-by-mail ballots may have a realistic impact on the results of the BOE budget vote,” Matt Rogers, the village’s attorney, wrote in a complaint filed June 10 in Bergen Superior Court. “Such verification may lead to the registered voters’ approval of the BOE budget and negate the reduction in the budget proposed by the village council.”
The county found 114 ballots that were “mistakenly rejected” for not having a postmark , but did . It has asked the court to allow those ballots to be counted, although they won’t change the result of the elections.
What is amazing is that the Village would have never known anything about the rejected ballots had not Mr. Loving made an OPRA request which allowed us to see the numbers. It seems the yearly average throughout NJ is around 3.5 percent. In this recent election , our rejection percentage was over 10 percent. About a third of the ballots were rejected because they arrived after 8 PM on the 14th. Very few were rejected because of signature issues although some were not signed at all. The others were rejected for a variety of issues including wrong envelope use, not filling in the ballot correctly, etc
While many residents have made serious sacrifices during the COVID19 pandemic the Village and Ridgewood Schools have made none . Frankly if you can not find $630,000 in cuts in a $115 million school budget we suggest you find yourself a proper accountant .
We also hunted around and found only one case where a judge overturned certified election results , and that was in 2015 a Middlesex County Judge overturned an election result because of of rampant voter fraud .
A disgraceful waste of taxpayer dollars. The election outcome will not change. Sorry Dan Creed.
“Rampant voter fraud”? This comment by Diaz refers to the actions of one Leslie Dominguez- Rodriguez who abused the voting rights of patients in a nursing home. There were 13 ballots that were found to be forged or otherwise tampered with (and probably more) – but at the hands of Dominguez- Rodriguez. To your readers – rampant implies many votes altered by many people.
This is not the first instance of reading your articles which are often editorials disguised as news stories.
And always written by “James” – do you have a last name? Or do you prefer to be anonymous?
and your point is????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Bob , you might want to re-read or read the article , I think you missed the point the author says the only time a certified election was overturned was because of voter fraud , implying Ridgewood is just pissing in the wind with the lawsuit ,try to keep up
Oh no! Does this Ms. Walsh won’t be mayor?
SO…..
What these liberals are saying is that
VOTING BY MAIL IS PRONE TO CORRUPTION ?
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Good to know.
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