The elimination of the “county line” primary ballot column was supposed to be a victory for democracy by putting voters back in charge of selecting the candidates that represent them. Federal District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi in his historic decision wrote: “The integrity of the democratic process for a primary election is at stake” and candidates who had sued to request a redesign of the ballot had proven that “their constitutional rights are violated by the present ballot design.”
Judge Quaishi’s 49-page landmark ruling abolished the controversial county line system, which provided candidates favored by the political organizations with a significant advantage. The intent of the ruling was to end the New Jersey primary election ballot system that allowed the state’s party machines to flourish and favored establishment candidates over outsiders.
Specifically, the decision as Tracey Tully pointed out in a The New York Times article entitled “New Jersey’s Ballot Must Be Immediately Redesigned, Federal Judge Rules,” called for the elimination of bracketing — putting “together candidates in the same column based on endorsement by political party leaders, rather than grouping candidates together based on the office which they are running.”
The Judge’s decision was backed-up empirically by Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers University professor, whose research revealed that ballot line placement provided a substantial average advantage of 38 percentage points to candidates who received the party line. According to Rubin, “New Jersey primary voters are encouraged by the county parties, and conditioned by years of practice to vote for all the candidates on the county line,”