Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Trail Mix: Filing Deadline Week 2012
The April 2 filing deadline brought a lot of activity to the New Jersey Division of Elections. There were several nights in which the Division workers stayed on the job until midnight processing nominating petitions for federal and state offices, as well as delegates to the Republican National Convention and Democratic National Convention. The filing deadline also brought with it petition challenges, some with merit and some without, all of which were handled by the Office of Administrative Law on April 10. The following entry highlights some of the legal issues that surfaced during filing week and its aftermath.
1. “All Quiet on the Western Front”: Howes & Howes represented the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in several legal matters. Specifically, we represented Gov. Romney in four challenges to slates of delegates to the Republican National Convention filed by supporters of Senator Rick Santorum. We challenged these petitions on the grounds that they did not contain enough legally sufficient signatures of registered voters. The law and GOP rules require that convention delegates from each congressional district collect a minimum of 100 qualified signatures from voters within the congressional district. Further, the persons collecting those signatures must reside within the congressional district and the delegates themselves must reside within the congressional district. The Office of Administrative Law held three hearings, and Gov. Romney prevailed in all three. During the fourth hearing, both Team Santorum and I received information from our respective campaigns. The news bulletin was that Senator Santorum had suspended his campaign. Our hearing continued. It reminded me a bit of the classic novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” in which the fighting continued on past the announcement of the Armistice, and one of the protagonists was killed after the “all quiet” was sounded. Unlike the novel, no one died in this battle. We settled the issues of the hearing about a half hour after the announcement.
2. Andrews v. Rajoppi: Is it precedent or is it not?: Once the petition challenges pass, the Secretary of State certifies the federal and state candidates to the county clerks. The county clerks then prepare the primary election ballot. One of the steps in the preparation of the ballot is the drawing for ballot position. In the drawing, the county clerk’s office draws names at random. The county clerk determines ballot position based on the results of that draw. Like almost anything else in elections, there has been significant litigation surrounding the drawing and the arrangement of the primary election ballot. The most recent of these decisions was Andrews v. Rajoppi. In the Andrews decision, the Appellate Division laid out a standard for how each county clerk should conduct the draw and the design in years in which there is a statewide election for US Senate or Governor. This year involves, among other things, a US Senate election. Oddly enough, the county clerks do not all agree on whether the Andrews case is binding on them. The group that holds that Andrews is not binding points to the fact that the Appellate Division did not publish Andrews, and as such, the decision has less precedential value than a published opinion. The group that holds that Andrews is binding can point to the fact that the Supreme Court did not grant certification, and that it binds all twenty-one county clerks because they were all parties to the litigation. Apparently, this will be an open issue going into the 2013 gubernatorial election. There will likely be a contested Democratic primary for the nomination.
3. Empower Our Neighborhoods: Lurking in the background of the filing deadline was the lawsuit known as Empower Our Neighborhoods v Guadango et al. One of the main issues in the suit is the validity of the requirement that a petition circulator be a voter who is eligible to sign the petition that he or she is circulating. That is, there is a legal requirement that