Andy Kim couldn’t rest one evening last September.
“I didn’t get a single minute of sleep that night,” he recalled in an interview with NPR, “I really felt like I had to do something and really show people that, you know, when there’s these problems in our politics, that there are people who want to step up and try to fix it.”
Refusing to walk “the line”
Unlike every other state, which lists candidates on ballots by the office they are running for, New Jersey’s primary ballots have been organized around a slate of candidates generally endorsed by local party leaders and then presented to voters as a line of names together, either vertically or horizontally depending on the county.
Other candidates for the same office are often place in columns or rows farther away, a place critics refer to as “ballot Siberia.”
One such critic, Rutgers University associate dean Julia Sass Rubin, has studied the line system — in place since roughly the 1940s — and found it was extraordinarily successful at electing the candidates endorsed by both Democratic and Republican party bosses.
“I looked at this in multiple ways, both in terms of historical legislative races, congressional races, gubernatorial races, and it provides a double-digit advantage to candidates consistently over a period of 20 years, I found,” she told NPR.
In February, Kim filed a lawsuit challenging that ballot system.
In March, Murphy dropped out of the Senate primary race. Her campaign was lagging as Kim was scoring upset victories in local Democratic county conventions, suggesting a victory was not guaranteed for her but a bruising primary was in sight.
“It is clear to me that continuing in this race will involve waging a very divisive and negative campaign which I am not willing to do,” she said in a video statement announcing her exit from the race.
And then in April, Kim won in court.
A federal appeals court upheld a preliminary injunction that bars the use of the line balloting system in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. A judge in the case ruled that the system was discriminatory because it punishes candidates not endorsed by party leaders.
The Republican ballots in Tuesday’s primary will still use the line system as they were not involved in the legal challenge.
Professor Rubin, an expert witness in the case, said its impact on state politics could be profound. “It’s an absolute earthquake for the state because the county line has allowed a handful of people, really a handful of men, to make all the decisions for the state. If you can control who gets elected to political office, you can control everything.”
Rubin says Kim benefitted from good timing — he was the right candidate at the right political moment. “He definitely had the right framing for people to believe that he is a reformer, and he was willing to take that risk and go up against the system.”
