Tammy Murphy

A lawyer representing county clerks in New Jersey has requested that a judge delay his landmark decision of scrapping the state’s county-line ballot design, a system that critics say has given tremendous weight to establishment candidates at the expense of outsiders.

In his March 29 opinion, Judge Quraishi said that he assigned Rubin’s testimony “substantial weight,” based on her “demeanor, manner in which she testified, and substance of her testimony which was corroborated by other evidence presented.”

“It undermines the entire system of machine power,” Sass Rubin said. “It’s a different world. I just think you’ve taken away such a huge chunk of what they have to keep in power and really the only thing that makes us different.”

One study by Julia Sass Rubin, an associate dean at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Policy at Rutgers, found that being on the county line gave congressional candidates an advantage of 38 percentage points.

“We are the last of the [political] machine states, and the machine relies on the county line to stay in control,” Rubin told The Washington Post last week. “If you displease the people who decide who gets the line,” you could lose your office, she said.

“I think what [the line] produces is whatever the machine needs to produce to stay in power,” said Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers professor and prominent critic of the line balloting. “In Murphy’s case, because he had the resources to run and he ran as a progressive, we got a progressive governor…”

A long-simmering fight over New Jersey’s unique primary ballot design reached a federal courtroom Monday in a case that has the potential to upend not only the state’s tense U.S. Senate race but Garden State politics in general.

Rutgers University professor Julia Sass Rubin, who has analyzed the impact of the county line in elections, published a study last year that detailed the advantage it gives to candidates who have the line.

New Jersey is the only state in the nation with this type of bracketed ballot design. According to Julia Sass Rubin, a public-policy professor at Rutgers, a candidate who gets the line enjoys a double-digit advantage over the competition

This system allows parties to give preferential ballot placement to their preferred candidates, putting endorsees in a prominent location while relegating others to less visible spots known as “ballot Siberia.” That design confers an extreme advantage: Rutgers professor Julia Sass Rubin concluded that between 2002 and 2022, candidates on the county line enjoyed an average boost of 38 points.