Democratic leaders, not primary voters, plan to stack NJ district's ballot with hand-picked favorites

Voters in one New Jersey legislative district will face an entirely different slate of candidates than the one they voted on in the primary, prompting new calls for political reform.

State Sen. Dick Codey (D-West Orange) announced his retirement last week — setting off a chain of events that includes one of his running mates dropping out, and her husband seeking office on their ticket.

Essex County Democratic Committee leaders are proposing that Assemblyman John McKeon (D-West Orange), Codey’s longtime running mate, run for the senate seat, and that Brendan Gill, an Essex County commissioner and ally of Gov. Phil Murphy, run for what’s currently McKeon’s seat in the Assembly.

Brendan Gill’s wife, Alixon Collazos-Gill, who won the primary for the second Assembly seat in June, dropped out of the race following Codey’s announcement. Now Livingston Township Councilwoman Rosaura Bagolie has been tapped by party leaders to run for the Assembly.

Though party leaders describe that reshuffling as Brendan Gill taking McKeon’s current spot on the ticket, rather than his wife’s, there’s not much practical difference. Both are Assembly seats serving the same constituency.

“I will tell you that for me personally, when I read that Brendan Gill was going to take over for his wife, it just made me sick to my stomach,” said Elizabeth Redwine, of West Orange, who serves on the Essex County Democratic Committee. “And this is nothing personal against either of them. But I donated to her campaign and my phone blew up with people who had supported her.”

Members of the county Democratic committee who live in Legislative District No. 27 are scheduled to vote on the new slate at a meeting Thursday at 6 p.m., at West Orange High School. Redwine hopes there will be enough opposition to stop the new slate.

“It gives credence to the worst suspicions about how politics go in this state, and I care about that,” Redwine said. “I really care about that as a voter, as a Democrat, as a parent, as an educator, as a volunteer. I want everybody, especially our newer voters, to believe in this process, and I just don't know how we can do that when this is what is happening.”

Brendan Gill said the changes to the ticket are merely a result of last-minute retirements. Longtime Assemblyman Thomas Giblin (D-Montclair), who had been moved into the 27th District when the boundaries were redrawn, announced shortly before the primary he wouldn’t seek re-election.

“I did have an interest at the time [in the Assembly seat]. … This also was a very kind of last-minute thing in that the vacancy on the Legislative District 27 ticket opened up,” Brendan Gill said. But he didn’t want to be part of an all-white male ticket, he said.

Now that his wife has dropped out and a woman is running, he said, he wants to be on the slate.

“One of the most significant things for me, for the ticket itself, was that it maintained the diversity that it currently had,” he said.

The post-primary switch is particularly galling to some political reformers because State Sen. Nia Gill (D-Montclair) will lose her seat at the end of this term. The redistricting put her in the same district as Codey, who beat her in a rare incumbent-vs-incumbent primary race. Nia Gill is not related to Brendan Gill and Alixon Collazos-Gill.

She’s also one of the few Black women in the senate, a group that is shrinking due to redistricting and retirements.

“Voters, and particularly women, are very frustrated, very disaffected, and feeling that there has been a multitude of machinations that are only benefiting men in positions of power,” Antoinette Miles of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance said. “And so as someone looking at this from the outside looking in, I certainly look at this as a connection to all of the broader reforms and things that are necessary to make New Jersey truly a representative democracy.”

The process that resulted in Nia Gill losing her seat, and a general election full of candidates who didn’t run for those seats in the primary, shows how New Jersey’s democracy is riddled with flaws, reformers say.

“Frankly, the machine is making a mockery of democracy. This is not how the process should work,” Henal Patel, law and policy director for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, said.

She objects to the redistricting in 2021, which she said made it harder for people of color to get elected in the diverse western suburbs of Essex County. And Patel is calling for reform of what is known as “the county line,” the practice of grouping candidates who are endorsed by the party together on the primary ballot, giving them an advantage. She’d also like to see the redistricting process reformed.

Nia Gill is one of the rare legislators who originally ran without her party’s endorsement in a primary, and won. In 2003, she beat Leroy Jones, who is now the chair of the Essex County Democratic Committee and the State Democratic Committee.

After her district was combined with Codey’s, she again had to run without the party endorsement – or the preferential treatment of the county line.

“This is an example of broader problems. The system is allowing this. No one here is alleging that all of this is happening in complete contravention of the law. This is happening because this is how the system allows it to happen,” Patel said.

Some Democrats would like to see Nia Gill on the ballot. But like almost every state in the country, New Jersey has what’s called a “sore loser law” which prevents someone who loses a primary from running in the general election. Gill is prohibited from running as a nominee from either party, and if she wanted to run as an independent, she would have to have filed her signature petitions by 4 p.m. on the day of the primary, in June.

The Democratic candidates are slated to face Republicans Michael Byrne for the state Senate seat, and Irene DeVita and Jonathan Sym for the Assembly seats. As of the primary election, there were more than 87,500 registered Democrats in the district and about 26,300 registered Republicans.