Two Challengers on Election Day: A Day in the Life in South Jersey
New Jersey is still reeling from Election Day 2021. Governor Murphy made the cut; State Senator Steve Sweeney was not so fortunate. We could hear the whoosh of the power vacuum shift on its New Jersey axis as the votes came in last week, especially here in South Jersey.
On that auspicious Tuesday, Kate Delany and I schlepped to the wilds of Blackwood where the Vote by Mail ballots are counted in Camden County. The Board of Elections warehouse is located along a desolate road just steps from the Gloucester outlet shops because in true New Jersey fashion, you are never too far from a strip mall.
In our capacity as challengers for the independent candidates in the Gloucester Township mayoral race, we were there to watch the Vote by Mail count. We saw no other challengers there, which is surprising given that VBM is how the bulk of Camden County votes now. Camden County leads all other counties in NJ in the VBM method of herding votes. Kate and I have been organizing and advocating for electoral transparency on the local level and being present for the Vote by Mail process is a big piece of the puzzle in how the stew is made here in South Jersey.
What can challengers do at the Vote by Mail count, one might ask? To start the process, candidates must declare in writing who their challengers are and then the challengers are mailed official embossed documentation, complete with badge. Attached to the documentation is a Notice to Challengers and this information, which is really like your father’s Oldsmobile, mostly concerns what challengers may and may not do at the actual polling location, for example a challenger, “MAY make official challenges on Disenfranchisement”. “Challengers MAY NOT stop voters to ask their names and addresses unless 100 feet from the polling place.” None of this applies to the huge process that is Vote by Mail counting. Kate and I look at each other and shrug, ok now what?
The BOE workers escorted us to the ‘viewing section’ of the large warehouse. Here, day workers open the thousands of VBM ballots and then election workers run the envelopes through a counting machine. There are approximately 50 people involved in these processes. Kate and I are relegated to a taped off area just outside the floor- to-ceiling chain link fence that separates us from the ballot openers and the counters. We have a guard assigned to us, just in case, and are instructed to stay within the very small taped off area. We are given chairs! We are not allowed to speak to anyone or ask questions, questions must only be directed to Board of Elections supervisors. In the June election, I stepped outside of the BOE warehouse in order to use my phone to call BOE officials who were inside to ask a question.
We realized that the election, Gloucester Township, that we were actually there for, had already been opened and envelopes counted and those ballots were already upstairs being counted. I flagged down a supervisor and asked to go upstairs to watch the actual count. We were escorted upstairs to where 5 people were doing the counting. Again, we had a guard assigned to us. It was Tony, who we now know on a first name basis. Just like in June, local elections that were seen as competitive, this time Gloucester and Camden, were pulled first to be counted, rather than counting towns in alphabetical order. We wonder if this early count information can be communicated to canvassers on the ground? We wonder if this is fair??
Counting consists of feeding the ballots into scanners which essentially look like desktop printers. Workers work on each batch of ballots, entering batch information into the desktop computers that are connected to the scanners. Camden County ballots are very long pieces of paper with several folds on each ballot, because of the ballot design, using the New Jersey line, the ballots have multiple folds. These folds make the counting machines often unhappy, spitting the ballots back out! One worker had several ballots spit out, up into the air and end up behind the desk. Two other workers were summoned and came to the rescue, fishing the ballots out with a yardstick with sticky tape attached.
As we left, we asked questions about how and when straggler VBM ballots would be counted. Were they counted every day, at what time, could we be present to watch this process? We never really got a definite answer but would find it helpful to have a transparent process for how these late votes are processed.
This document was shared with me by a smart friend, and is helpful, I however, could not locate the document on the Camden County website, which is both frustrating and not very transparent.
Here in New Jersey we are seeing that Election Day is quickly becoming Election Week, as the results are slower to come in due to such a large number of VBM ballots, making day-of decisions less possible. Again we feel more transparency is needed in this new frontier of vote counting. We did see that a camera had been installed in the upstairs counting room, the video is for whose purpose, we wonder?
