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“What Egan did, that is a manifestation of how machines operate,” said Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers University professor who has researched politics in New Jersey. “You just appoint your successor.”

 “Elected officials are aware of the importance of the line for their reelection and the power of county party chairs to award the line,” wrote Rubin. “If an elected official does not do as the county chair wants, they can lose the line and almost surely lose the primary, ending, or severely curtailing their political careers.”

Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers University professor, found in a recent study the county line gave congressional candidates in New Jersey an advantage of up to 38 percentage points. “When you give a small number of people with that amount of power, you’re opening up for corruption.”

The political leaders of all 21 counties award “the line”—which is essentially far more prominent positioning on the ballot—to their favored candidate. Everyone else appears in the margins. It sounds absurdly crude and biased, but it is highly effective: A study published last year in the Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy [by Professor Julia Sass Rubin] found that congressional candidates appearing on the line had a 38-point advantage.

“History suggests it’s an incredibly powerful force,” says Julia Sass Rubin. Her research shows that in the past 20 years, New Jersey incumbents running on the line finished with a record of 206 wins and only three losses.

Representative Andy Kim, a Democrat running for Senate in New Jersey against the state’s first lady, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday that seeks to redesign the ballot before June’s contentious primary election, arguing the current layout unfairly benefits candidates supported by party leaders.

“Legislators elected with the help of leadership PACs become beholden to the leadership and more likely to vote for them as leaders, further concentrating power in their hands,” Rubin said.

According to Prof. Rubin’s findings, primary challengers will frequently drop out because they fear wasting the time and expense of running for office if they don’t have the line.  

Murphy could choose independently to disavow the line. And experts I spoke to — Rutgers Professor Julia Sass Rubin and Brett Pugach, the lead attorney on a lawsuit challenging the line’s constitutionality — agreed that’s the case.

“Everybody else is scattered across the ballot in different ways but always in a different column or row from the people on the line, and this has the effect of confusing voters as to what their choices are,” Rubin said.