Basic Website, Important Message! An Introduction

Welcome to the online home of New Jersey Coalition For Democracy Reform! Our goal is to make New Jersey better for everyone by improving how we do politics and elections. We’ll improve the website as we go but we need to get started so let’s go!

How many times have you heard about how corrupt New Jersey is?  Or about how high our taxes are or about how one political party or the other is responsible for all of our problems?  USnews.com ranks New Jersey’s ‘Natural Environment’ as #33 in the United States, we are #44 for ‘Infrastructure’, and #49 (almost last!) for “our “Fiscal Stability”!  Is it that we just can’t govern ourselves or is there a much larger problem that we’ve been overlooking?

New Jersey generally does better in areas that are non-partisan or private sector.  USnews.com ranks New Jersey as #5 for ‘Crime and Corrections’, #4 for ‘Healthcare’, and #1 (Gold star!) in the country for ‘Education’.  The good news is that we have a lot to be proud of, the bad news, there is a lot of room for improvement.

And that is where we are going to begin.

The problems we are going to be talking about have existed in New Jersey for a very long time.  These are problems that stand in the way of how our state and local governments function, problems that concentrate and abuse control over who gets elected to public office, and problems that interfere with our state government’s ability to find the best solutions to our most challenging issues.  New Jersey’s broken democratic systems are the biggest reason why our environment is #33 in the United States, our infrastructure is #44, and why we are almost the worst state in the country for how we handle our long and short term financial obligations.

I’m not the first person to reach this conclusion, a lot of very dedicated people are already trying to fix these problems.  What has been missing though is YOU,

NEW JERSEY NEEDS YOUR HELP. 

We need you to do one thing to help fix how we do democracy in New Jersey, WE NEED YOU TO VOTE.  

With these posts, we are going to methodically review how we do democracy in New Jersey and where the problems are.  We are going to discuss why these problems prevent our state and local governments from being able to effectively solve problems while encouraging corruption.  We’re also going to explain how we (that includes you!) are going to reform our democratic systems and return some of the control of our politics and elections to New Jersey voters! 

Having said all of that, let’s establish a few important points for how we’re going to work together to fix New Jersey;  

  1. Your political party doesn’t matter and the other people helping us to fix New Jersey, their political party doesn’t matter either.  This is what is called being ‘non-partisan’. Party doesn’t matter since the work we’re going to do to fix New Jersey is going to help everyone equally.
  2. We’re going to refer to facts when we talk about how we’re going to fix New Jersey.  Everybody has an opinion but it’s the accuracy of our facts that gives our opinions value so we need you to really understand and appreciate the importance of facts and stick to them.
  3. Our email list will be our only official communications channel so please keep an eye out for our emails and please do what you can to read and share them.  In New Jersey, the ONLY way to change how things work is organize an enormous group of supporters and then VOTE for candidates that will support that change. We have to be able to share our message and stay in touch with every voter in New Jersey that we can reach so we are going to do that with emails.
  4. Not everyone is going to agree with us so we have to focus on sharing our message with people that are interested in what we have to say.  These ideas are not a hard sell!  I repeat, these ideas are not a hard sell! The only thing that will determine how quickly we can convert our enthusiasm into legislative action is how quickly we can transport our message to voters throughout New Jersey.
  5. Please, as Patrick Swayze’s character Dalton said in the not-so-critically-acclaimed movie ‘Road House’, “Be nice.”  At all times, let’s speak to each other with respect and in a way that encourages people to participate.  Success is going to require that a whole lot of us come together to support fundamental changes to the way we do politics and elections so it will be very important that we build relationships with each other by just being nice!

We have a lot of work to do so I ask that you please stay subscribed to this list and keep an eye out for our next entry where we’ll start to unpack how exactly it is that we do politics and elections in New Jersey and how some of these practices are unique in the United States.

 Thank you for reading! 

Bart

https://www.businessinsider.com/most-miserable-cities-in-the-united-states-based-on-data-2019-9#50-lancaster-california-1

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/new-jersey

NEW JERSEY NEEDS YOUR HELP!

Blastmail, 5 DECEMBER, 2022

Why is it that you have to be a billionaire or a wealthy corporation for either of our political parties to listen to you?

In New Jersey we provide our children with the #1 ranked education system in the United States and yet our state government is #49 for fiscal responsibility. Why?

Why does such a small percentage of voters participate in the state’s primary elections?

Neither political party is to blame but both parties would benefit equally if only we could motivate them to fix how we do democracy in New Jersey.

Don’t worry, this IS NOT a request for a donation!

However, if you love New Jersey, if you live and work here, if you’re a student here, if you’re raising a family here, if you hope to retire here, and if you want to end the corruption, then please give us a chance to explain the problem.

You might disagree with us and that’s fine.

If you agree though, we’ll only ask that you please stay subscribed to this email list, share it with your friends/family/neighbors, and read our updates as we publish them.

We promise we won’t share your email address with anyone.

Start here; www.PTTP.buzz

As websites go, it has room for improvement but it will be the hub for everything we are going to do to fix New Jersey.

Here’s a peek at our plan, it’s very simple;
1. ORGANIZE every non-partisan group that has an interest in a better New Jersey into a coalition with a common goal to fix New Jersey’s worst-in-the-country political and election practices once and for all (It helps everybody!)
2. EDUCATE New Jersey voters…..What the problems are and how to fix them
3. VOTE only for candidates that will take action

If you are a non-partisan group in New Jersey and you’d like to learn more about our plan, please email me at [email protected].

If you host group meetings and you’d like us to attend a meeting to discuss democracy reform initiatives directly with your group, please email me at [email protected].

If you will be in the area of Jersey City this Thursday, December 8 at 6:00 PM, please join host VCNJ for a peek at the newly introduced “Municipal and School Board Voting Options Act” and see how it works as we rank Jersey City restaurants! For more info and to RSVP: https://www.voterchoicenj.org/jersey-city-rank-the-restaurants

That’s it for now and thank you for your time in reading this. We’ll be back in touch soon but please check out the website (www.PTTP.buzz), please forward this email to everyone you know that wants a better New Jersey (Republican or Democrat), and please don’t stop being awesome! You’re from New Jersey!

Regards,

Bart Cocchiola
Executive Director, NJCDR Inc
[email protected]


New Jersey Coalition For Democracy Reform Inc is a 501(c)(3) non-partisan non-profit NJ corporation. 🙂

Politics and Elections, Part 1

Bart Cocchiola, December 14, 2022

New Jersey Coalition For Democracy Reform Inc is working to unite New Jersey in support of comprehensive democracy reform. By ‘Democracy Reform’ we mean improving governance in New Jersey by improving our political and election practices to encourage more participation by voters, a greater variety of less extreme candidates, and a system of elections that respects voters by presenting candidates for office in a manner that is fair and impartial.

To understand more about what that means, let’s first look at how government and politics in New Jersey are organized.

The government of New Jersey is very similar in structure to our US federal government; there are three branches (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial), the Legislative branch consists of an Assembly and a Senate, and there is a Constitution. For all of the organizational details related to our state government, read this very informative article from Wikipedia.com.

New Jersey has forty legislative districts, each with two General Assembly Members and one Senator so there are a total of eighty (80) Members of the New Jersey General Assembly and forty (40) Members of the New Jersey Senate.  The forty (40) New Jersey legislative districts are different from the twelve (12) congressional districts by which we elect representatives to the US House of Representatives.  The legislative and congressional districts may be mapped out differently but the political and election systems/practices they rely on are the same.

The two political parties recognized by the state are The Democratic Party and The Republican Party. Voters that choose to not register with a political party are technically known as ‘Unaffiliated’. The process for becoming an additional recognized political party in New Jersey is both vague and onerous which helps to explain why our two dominant parties remain dominant.

Even though New Jersey citizens are divided into forty state legislative districts, the Republican and Democratic parties are organized by county resulting in twenty one county political committees and committee chairpersons per party. Each party also has a state committee and state committee chairperson. Both parties are subordinate to their national organizations, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

According to the New Jersey Voter Information Portal, as of the November, 2022 General Election, there were 6,508,146 registered voters in New Jersey. 1,526,446 (23.5%) were Republicans, 2,532,417 (38.9%) were Democrats, and 2,369,262 (36.4%) were unaffiliated with the remainder (about 1%) being affiliated with various 3rd party organizations. Neither political party has a statewide majority of voters and the concentrations of Democrats, Republicans, and Unaffiliated voters vary throughout the state.  Some districts regularly elect Republicans, some reliably elect Democrats and some are not quite as predictable from election to election.

In the United States, each state has independent and full control over how their elections are conducted.  What we do in New Jersey is similar in some ways to other states and not similar at all in other ways. Changes to our election laws are made by the Legislature and signed by the Governor, however, the design of our forty state legislative districts is controlled by our New Jersey State Constitution.  Individual county election offices, each managed by an elected County Clerk (Can be an Independent, Republican, Democrat, etc.), control election day preparations and protocols as well as ballot design.  

Elections in New Jersey consist of Primary and General elections. Primary elections are held in preparation for upcoming general elections allowing the two main political parties to narrow their different candidate groups down to one nominee each for each office sought. General elections may consist of a combination of both federal level and statewide races in addition to county, municipal, and school board elections. All elections, other than school board elections which are non-partisan, will consist of candidates from each of the two recognized parties plus candidates considered Independent or 3rd Party.

Elections in New Jersey don’t require a majority to win, they only require a ‘plurality’ of votes.  Being elected by a ‘majority’ of votes means that more than half of the votes were for the winning candidate.  A ‘plurality’ of votes means that the winning candidate only has more votes than the other candidates, not necessarily a majority.  Keep in mind that a candidate might have become the nominee in a primary where as little as 17% of eligible voters participated only to go on to a general election victory with less than half of the voters supporting him/her. Who benefits from candidates making it into office with so little public support? Whose work will that elected person actually do when a huge majority of voters didn’t vote for that candidate?

New Jersey taxpayers pay for New Jersey’s closed primary election system.  In a closed primary election, only voters registered with one of the two recognized political parties can vote in their party’s elections.  Unaffiliated voters (almost 40% of voters in New Jersey!!!) must join a party the day of the primary in order to vote in that primary, a requirement that shouldn’t be necessary for a person who is paying to help fund those primaries.

End of Part 1!

This would be a great time to take a break, maybe click and read some of the links above, and subscribe to the NJCDR email list.  It’s also a great time to consider if any of the clubs or associations that you belong to would be interested in learning of our efforts to reform New Jersey’s democratic systems. 

If you SUBSCRIBE to this effort to organize NJ voters and if you SHARE this information with new people we will achieve SUCCESS and it’s all run by volunteers!

Politics and Elections, Part 2

Bart Cocchiola, 14 December, 2022

At all levels, government exists “For the People”.   The taxes we pay as citizens are our investment in the effective and efficient administration of our state, county, and local governments for the benefit of all residents.  What we do in New Jersey to elect candidates and to fund our government isn’t for the benefit of the DNC or RNC, it is for New Jersey.

Having presented the basics of how our government and politics are organized in Part 1, let’s look at how political parties and their leadership dominate what happens in the state.  

Our two established political parties are complicated, privately run entities which can be subject to, and which benefit from, public regulation. They are each structured so as to include national, state, county, and sometimes local committees with each level having leadership that influences both party activities and election outcomes. 

Political parties should exist as groups of voters with common beliefs and values interested in helping citizens to fulfill their role in our democracy as voters. Instead, both parties have evolved as extremely wealthy, powerful and influential organizations that often promote their own interests over the values and needs of their own members.  In fact, Americans across the country have never been more dissatisfied with our two political parties

Political committees at all levels endorse candidates for office, a practice that was illegal in New Jersey until the mid 1970’s.  Laws prevented political parties from endorsing candidates in order to prevent unreasonable and inappropriate influence on voters during primary campaigns/elections.  After all, how can primary elections be free and fair if one candidate for each office is running with the virtually insurmountable advantage of an endorsement from their local political committee?  

It gets worse.  Legislative and congressional districts are intentionally designed to give the advantage to one party or the other.  In those districts that are designed to heavily favor one party, the endorsement is the election.  The candidate that receives the party endorsement is all but guaranteed to win the primary election and then go on to win the general election. 

The endorsement of candidates by their political parties prior to their primary elections has shown that, not surprisingly, endorsed candidates win primary elections.  As a result, fewer and fewer people bother to vote in primaries because of the persistent expectation that endorsed candidates will win regardless of who runs against them.  Furthermore, the few people that actually do vote in primaries are likely to be those that are most enthusiastically following directions from party leadership.  With groups of the most extreme voters choosing endorsed candidates via primaries, non-endorsed candidates have little chance of winning.  You might be thinking, why would anyone even continue a campaign once they’ve failed to secure their committee endorsement?  Now you understand why there aren’t more candidates running for these positions!

And what about the campaigns of endorsed candidates? They are directed towards their party’s most extreme voters using the most extreme ideas.  Once elected, they have difficulty explaining to the people that endorsed them why they might need to compromise in working with elected officials from the other party to solve problems and get stuff done.  In this environment, compromise is political suicide so very little gets done, voters lose, government remains ineffective, our tax money goes to waste.

Democracy reform is about getting more people involved in our political and election practices, it is about having elected officials represent greater segments of our population, it is about creating conditions where elected officials can collaborate with greater numbers of other elected officials to build consensus around better solutions to help more people.  I hope you see now that our current system of primary elections does none of this.

But wait, it gets worse!  Once those candidates are endorsed by their political committees, they get the best spots on the ballots.  For each office that is up for election, there is an endorsed candidate and all of the endorsed candidates are arranged in a line with each having a label below their names showing they are their local party’s endorsed candidate.  It’s referred to as ‘The County Line’, there is no other state in the country that designs their ballots this way and 65% of voters polled in New Jersey disapprove of it.  Here is everything you could ever want to know about ‘The County Line’ written by Brett M. Pugach, Esq. for the Rutgers University Law Review in 2020;

https://rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/72_Rutgers_Univ_L_Rev_0629_Pugach.pdf

The link below includes a video; click ahead to the 55 minute mark of the video where the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee Chair, Arlene Q. Perez, is introduced.  She explains everything I’ve just said in stunning and frank clarity.  Arlene is the sister of Wanda whom I served with as a school board member so we are all neighbors, for what it’s worth. I respect Arlene’s service to her community and appreciate her honesty.  

Political parties should not accept a culture and practices that discourage a broad variety of enthusiastic candidates from being involved. Political parties should not accept a culture and practices which encourage candidates to narrowly focus their campaigns on the most extreme voters, that discourage more voters from participating, and which exclude unaffiliated voters.

The fact of the matter is, local political committees, even on their best most credible day, shouldn’t conduct what amounts to a privately administered candidate endorsement process, ahead of the primaries, when there is already a publicly funded, statewide, primary election process in place that appropriately places that responsibility on voters to select their candidates. 

Political parties can make sure voters are educated as to what the issues are and can create opportunities for voters to hear about candidates directly from the candidates themselves.  Parties can make sure a maximum number of voters show up at polls and cast ballots on the day of the primary election.  Parties can ensure their candidates are prepared should they become their party’s nominee when the primaries have been completed. Lastly, parties can create and sustain a culture that encourages their elected members to seek out the best ideas to solve problems on behalf of all residents, regardless of where those ideas come from.

Politics and Elections, Part 3

Bart Cocchiola, December 14, 2022

We’ve discussed the basics of how government in New Jersey is organized (Politics and Elections, Part 1) and how political parties exist mostly for their own benefit (Politics and Elections, Part 2). We’ve also pointed out how nearly 40% of voters in New Jersey are not affiliated with either major political party but are forced to help pay for primary elections that they can’t vote in.

It is worth mentioning again, after decades of political and election manipulation by our two dominant political parties, New Jersey is second to last in the United States for fiscal stability, an important indicator of our state government’s overall effectiveness. In fact, half of the states ranked in the USnews.com top ten for fiscal stability are also ranked in the top ten overall. As USnews.com puts it, “The fiscal stability of a state’s government is vital to ensuring the success of government-sponsored programs and projects and the quality of life of the state’s residents.”

It won’t be easy but there is a way to fix these problems we’ve identified. Generally speaking, increasing the competitiveness of elections by giving greater opportunities for more candidates and more voters to participate will ensure that more well rounded, less extreme candidates get elected. Candidates of either party that disavow extremist ideas in pursuit of winning over more broad segments of the voter population will have more freedom to work across party lines to solve challenging problems. When effective, bi-partisan solutions can remain in place election after election we save money, our communities and economy can thrive, and the resources of our government can be put to work more effectively. Our taxes might even go down!

So let’s look at how we fix New Jersey!

OPEN PRIMARIES: Closed primary elections need to be replaced with an agreed-upon primary election format that allows unaffiliated and 3rd party voters to participate without the need for them to register with a party. Independent voters are not involved in party activities prior to the election and so the requirement to register on or before the primary election date is unreasonable.

PROHIBIT PARTY ENDORSEMENTS: Regarding party endorsements of primary election candidates, a recent survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that greater than 60% of the people polled from either party believe political parties should not endorse candidates! Endorsing candidates contradicts the foundational principle of free and fair elections! Removing endorsements allows each candidate to run for office on their own merits without the need to first empower themselves by becoming a local party insider. More candidates means more ideas being discussed and considered by voters. More ideas means the better ideas will eventually carry into actual policy making New Jersey better.

STANDARD BALLOTS & ELIMINATE THE COUNTY LINE: New Jersey has twenty one county election offices that each do ballot design differently. Voters across New Jersey should all use ballots designed to the same standards and without features that clearly favor candidates or party affiliation. In this analysis by Julia Sass-Rubin, The County Line and endorsements are demonstrated to negatively influence voter behavior; https://www.njpp.org/publications/report/does-the-county-line-matter-an-analysis-of-new-jerseys-2020-primary-election-results/

Learn more about The County Line here; https://www.abolishtheline.org/

Federal lawsuit to abolish The County Line in New Jersey; https://gothamist.com/news/nj-candidates-and-activists-join-federal-lawsuit-take-election-ballot-design-out-party-machines-hands

INDEPENDENT REDISTRICTING: Every ten years, after the US Census has been completed, the forty legislative districts of New Jersey are redesigned to account for changes in population across the state. The procedure for doing this is specified in the New Jersey State Constitution. According to the procedure, a combination of politically appointed members and one independent chairperson are assigned to The New Jersey Redistricting Commission to negotiate new district boundaries that will be used for state elections for the next ten years. Politically appointed members in charge of negotiating these boundaries on behalf of their parties ensure political dominance in most districts by one party or the other which is bad for New Jersey.

The commission to determine legislative district boundaries should be made up of members that are independent of the two major political parties and the emphasis should be placed on creating competitive districts where outcomes are not preordained according to political affiliations.

HAVE YOU SUBSCRIBED TO OUR MAILING LIST YET?

All of the solutions suggested above are reasonable and put the interests of New Jersey voters above all else. Each solution helps to return an appropriate amount of control of our political and election practices to voters.

The challenge for us is that we must convince elected officials to do what is best for voters instead of what is best for the party leaders that helped get them elected and who will help them get re-elected! The only way to do this is to organize voters all across the State of New Jersey to support these reforms and to let candidates for office at all levels know that they will not get elected unless they support transforming these democracy reform ideas into new state laws. We have a lot of work to do and we are just getting started!

YOU can help! Please SUBSCRIBE to our email list if you haven’t already and please SHARE these posts and the website address with friends/family/neighbors/etc. Only by building a massive coalition of non-partisan organizations and New Jersey voters will we force these changes to happen!

Thank you for reading!

A Post About YOU!

Let’s talk about YOU this time.  We’ll come back to why Comprehensive Democracy Reform is the only way to fix the damage being done by New Jersey’s unelected political party leaders, but let’s skip ahead to why YOU are so important in this campaign to fix New Jersey.

If you have an issue with our government that affects some part of life in New Jersey and it’s really important to you, what are your options to make change happen?

If the issue you’ve identified is supported by one of the two political parties, it might be relatively easy to bring it to their attention.  They might agree with you and the issue you’ve raised might be fixed in due time.

Democracy reform isn’t complex but it affects both parties and the solutions reduce the ability of party leaders to control election outcomes and who you can vote for.  In other words, fixing our democracy is going to be a lot harder!

But, why are YOU so important?  YOU are important because only voters want to fix what is wrong with New Jersey’s election and political systems and so only voters can fix what is wrong with New Jersey’s election and political systems.  The two legacy political parties won’t just give us back control of our democracy so we are going to have to fix this problem ourselves and that includes YOU.

The only way we can force change in New Jersey is through elections.  As it is right now, only the party committees are organized enough to really control who gets elected.  Some of us vote but voting in New Jersey is a sham exercise where winning candidates are determined by committee endorsements before the primary elections in districts that are intentionally designed by party-affiliated appointees so some always go red and some always go blue.  

In order to make a government for New Jersey that we’d actually want, ALL of YOU out there have to VOTE and it has to be for candidates that support COMPREHENSIVE DEMOCRACY REFORM.  

Don’t worry who those candidates are yet, except for a select few in our state legislature, they don’t exist.  Trust me though, they’ll be there when we’re ready because we aren’t going away and they are going to come to find that supporting Comprehensive Democracy Reform will be good for their political careers!

Here’s an example of how easy it is for you to help make this happen.  Type an email to a friend in New Jersey that says; 

I thought you might like to know about this web site, www.PTTP.buzz

Then click SEND.  Your friends will appreciate you turning them on to our campaign to make New Jersey better and I’ll make sure they get the information they need.  Whatever you do, please don’t get into arguments with friends and/or family over this.  Not everyone will get it, that’s fine, we will still recruit all of the help we’re going to need.

You can also share a link to www.PTTP.buzz on social media or make a TikTok telling your audience about the work you and the rest of us are doing!  Find us on www.HiWEAVE.com and just say hi, ask a question, or tell us how easy it’s been to tell you friends/neighbors about our campaign to reform New Jersey’s democratic systems! Send us links to your social media posts so we can share them too!  Encourage the people you speak with to SUBSCRIBE so they can receive every email as we send them.

YOU are important and I hope YOU want a better New Jersey as badly as I do.  We just need to reach enough YOU’s and then we’ll have a huge US and with a huge US, WE can make this happen!

Want to hear something stupid?  The political community in New Jersey has a name for this horrible system of politics and elections that they’ve created, they call it “The Machine”.  The Machine encourages corruption and makes sure we only get the government they want to give us instead of the government we want.  Here’s a great article by Charlie Stiles with actual examples of machine politics enabling corruption.  Here’s the link to the article;

https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/columnists/charles-stile/2022/05/31/money-corrupt-nj-politics-starts-locally-charles-stiles/9959076002/

In manipulating our election and political systems, the leaders of our two political parties have left us only one way to fight back;  WE MUST JOIN TOGETHER IN SUPPORT OF CANDIDATES THAT WILL ACT TO PASS COMPREHENSIVE DEMOCRACY REFORM LEGISLATION!!

Thank you for reading.  Please SUBSCRIBE if this message was forwarded to you.  Please check out our EVENT dates to join us in-person to learn more about how Comprehensive Democracy Reform will transform politics and elections in New Jersey for the better!

Bart Cocchiola

Executive Director, NJ Coalition For Democracy Reform Inc

NOTE: Regarding www.HiWEAVE.com, it is a new take on social media with features that are intended to make the community more functional and friendly. It was started by Michael Schoeffler (RU ’90) and is based in Highland Park. NJCDR has no financial interest in the site and we aren’t being paid to host activity there. We’re just trying to up-vibe Mike’s new platform and hoping to help a New Jersey business to be successful! They are still testing the software and part of that requires posting offensive content to see how the site’s algorithms catch it so ignore anything unappealing that you might see.

RCV CALL TO ACTION

Ranked Choice Voting CALL TO ACTION

Not just anybody can get elected in New Jersey.  To be a winning candidate it takes a certain quality that is probably different from what you’d expect.  Experience, problem solving skills, and a local connection to the community are things you might guess a candidate needs but, most of all, to be a winning candidate in New Jersey you have to prove you can play ball.  Not in the sports sense of the words but in the cooperation sense of the words.  You have to prove you understand how the system of influence works and signal that you are ok with it and that you won’t challenge the people that benefit from it.  If you can prove you know how to play ball, you’re in the club.

As a voter, are you ok with that?  You might not get the best candidates to choose from but at least the candidates you’re electing won’t challenge the status quo!   

The status quo in New Jersey, according to USnews.com, is that we are #49 in the country for fiscal stability and #41 for infrastructure, two important contributors to overall quality of life.  Of the best states in which to retire, according to a newly released report from WalletHub.com, New Jersey is #49 due to our high cost of living and high state taxes. The website TruthInAccounting.org ranks New Jersey dead last in the country for overall fiscal health.

If you’ve ever wondered why waiting for politicians in New Jersey to solve problems is like the movie ‘Groundhog Day’, where the same exact day plays out over and over again, it’s because the people we elect don’t represent us, they represent the political machine that requires them to obey it or risk being ejected from it.  Truth be told, we don’t exactly elect people in New Jersey, not in the democratic sense anyway.  In New Jersey we rubber stamp candidates that have been selected by our local political committee leaders and then put into a neat and easily found line of the ballot colloquially known as “The County Line”.  

Don’t take my word for it, here’s an example of how the system controls who runs and who doesn’t; https://hudsonreporter.com/2021/04/19/chiaravalloti-ends-re-election-bid/.  

In order to have elections where voters of both parties can choose a candidate that they might actually want, we need a new system for electing people that can adequately process more than just two candidates.  That system is called Ranked Choice Voting and it is as easy as putting a few choices in your order of preference, that’s it, election officials do the rest.

Ranked Choice Voting uses multiple rounds of tabulation to process your selections so that you can vote first for the person that you really want to win without having to worry about wasting your vote.  Explaining it with words makes it sound much more complicated than it really is so just click the image below to see a short video about how Ranked Choice Voting works.

CALL TO ACTION

This CALL TO ACTION is in support of the Municipal and School Board Voting Options Act.  Introduced by Senators Andrew Zwicker and Linda Greenstein and Assemblyman Daniel Benson on December 5, 2022, this bill (S3369 in the Senate, A5039 in the General Assembly) will enable local governments to conduct Mayor, Council/Committee, and School Board elections via Ranked Choice Voting should their local voters approve such a change via referendum.

To help this legislation to pass we must;

As support for this legislation grows, we’ll publish a new CALL TO ACTION to help it exit committee and be brought to a vote.  Thank you for the time/effort you may invest in this effort!

New Jersey is worth fixing!

DONATE

Bart Cocchiola

Exec. Director, NJCDR

www.PTTP.buzz

Guest Post! Why Electoral Reform?

Our guest contributor is Steve Barratt, co-Founder of the Facebook group, Coalition For Citizen Initiative New Jersey. Thank you very much to Steve for the time and effort he put into this piece.

 Why Do We Need Ranked Choice Voting?

Are we really a majority rule democracy?

Under the current system, the candidate with the most votes wins. This is known as “Plurality Voting.”  As the number of candidates grows, the number of votes needed to win shrinks.   In a four-way election, the winning candidate needs as little as 26% of the vote to win.  Another way to look at this is that a candidate can win while 74% of voters preferred someone else.

Negative campaigning works in this plurality system.

A candidate with a strong base can win by tearing down the other candidates and winning with a minority of support.  This encourages negative campaigning and enhances the effectiveness of anonymous money that comes in from outside the jurisdiction where the election is taking place.

Voters must vote strategically.

Our current election practices do two things to hurt democracy; they discourage more than two candidates from running and, when there is more than two candidates, they discourage voters from choosing their preferred candidate out of a fear that their vote will be “wasted” allowing the lesser candidate to win.  This tendency to choose the “lesser of two evils” instead of the preferred third-party candidate skews the election outcome even before election day when polling inadvertently undercounts third party support.

Ranked Choice Voting IS Majority Rule.

Simply stated, Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is also known as “Instant Run-off.”  Voters can mark their ballot for candidates in order of preference.  If their first preference candidate cannot win, their vote will be cast for the candidate they marked as their second preference.  If that candidate cannot win, their vote goes to their third preference.  And so on.  It’s just like when you go out to dinner:  “I’d really like the Fish but if that’s not available, I’ll have the steak.”

Ranked Choice voting ensures that the candidate that is elected has the support of a majority of voters – over 50%.  With the ability to easily accommodate more than two candidates, Ranked Choice Voting makes elections more competitive and forces candidates to run positive campaigns that can attract a greater variety of voters.  Negative campaigning becomes a very risky proposition.  RCV also reduces the effectiveness of outside dark money that is usually spent on negative campaigning.  

Why do we need an Open-Primary Election?

Today, the primary elections are controlled by two major parties.  

They have their preferred candidates and those candidates are placed in a favorable position on the primary ballot called the “County Line.”  This position has been shown to afford that candidate a 35% point advantage over the other candidates.   This is the reason that so many primary races are unopposed in New Jersey, particularly for incumbents.  In fact, long serving incumbents have been known to drop out of their race for reelection when they have lost their position on the County Line.

There is little or no competition in our electoral system.

Competition for nomination is discouraged in the major parties.  The line also makes incumbents more accountable to their party leadership for their position than to their voters.  Candidates that lose in the primary are forbidden by law  to run in the general election against their party.  This is in the interest of “party unity.”  

When was the last time a candidate for office approached you to ask for your vote?  That’s right, they don’t have to.  The party made them your only choice.

How do candidates get on the County Line?  It differs by county.  In some counties they are elected to the line by the county party committee.  That’s a few hundred party faithful.  In other counties, candidates are placed on the Line by the county party leader.  

2.4 Million Voters are not welcomed to vote in primaries.

38 Percent of voters in New Jersey are not affiliated with a political party.  They pay taxes just like major party members but they are not allowed to vote in a primary election unless they first join a party.  The lack of competition described above provides little incentive to join a party to essentially rubber-stamp the choices made by party leadership.  So thirty eight cents out of every dollar spent by the State to put on the primary elections comes from people who are not invited to the primaries.

An Open Primary would restore true competition to our electoral process. 

A single open primary, open to all voters and all candidates, would make the process of candidate selection more democratic.  The top four vote-getters in the primary election would be nominated to run in the general election.  The general election would use RCV rules to select the candidate that is preferred  by the majority.  

Why do we need to reform Congressional Redistricting and Legislative Reapportionment?

Who draws the voting districts for Congress and the State in New Jersey?

According to the New Jersey State Constitution, the commissions that draw voting districts in New Jersey are made up of six members from each of the two parties that received the largest number of votes in the most recent gubernatorial election.  

The redistricting process is open only to major party members.

Why only politicians?  Why not community leaders that do not have a political party interest?  The parties now represent less than 65% of voters in New Jersey.  Who represents the rest of the voters in the process for grouping voters in the districts that will elect our political leaders?

The first key to party power is in the process of drawing voting districts.

This is referred to as Gerrymandering.  In New Jersey, the parties work together to make sure incumbents’ districts are not dismantled or that incumbents are not disadvantaged when the decennial census is released triggering a redrawing of voting districts.  

Look at the shape of many of the districts to get a hint at the level of manipulation.  There are even stories of legislative leaders moving their residence in order to remain in power.  Some communities are split between voting districts in order to provide enough voters to make an additional district friendly to RED or BLUE.  

So when the party places a candidate on the County Line in a “friendly” district, they will win the primary and they will win the general election.  No need to worry about voters!

Party politicians should have no influence in the drawing of districts.  Their participation  is a conflict of interest.

The process of redrawing districts is in the constitution.

Changing this corrupt system will require an amendment to the state constitution.