Skip to content

Voting Integrity Going Right Out the Window in New Jersey…Again

The endless road to voting integrity seems to get longer and longer as we get closer to the 2022 mid-term election. This week it was discovered that Tens of thousands of New Jersey voters are duplicated or missing critical information. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) found that thousands of duplicate registered voters had subtle changes to their names, but they were duplicated nonetheless. Some were triplicated, and some were used up to six times! Unfortunately, Tahesha Way, the NJ Secretary of State, refused to explain or disclose documentation to PILF on how NJ State officials plan to resolve this mysterious duplication of voter registrations. 

PILF has to resort to filing a lawsuit to obtain the most basic information regarding handling the state’s duplicate voter registrations. And once again, it was a private organization — not elected officials who should be monitoring these discrepancies — who pointed out the corruption in New Jersey’s voter rolls. NJ can easily register a person multiple times by making subtle changes to the personal bio-data at any given address on the voter rolls. For example, a Bill Smith could get two ballots by also registering as William Smith, or any variation of a middle initial added. An actual model in the state’s voter database is Julia Rose and Juila Rose. They are the same person with duplicate registrations but with two separate, unique Voter IDs.

Two names that stood out the most were those of Christopher and Jaqueline. These names were changed on the statewide voter rolls to Christoph and Jaquelin, a red flag that would undoubtedly indicate an error in the system. “We can’t let New Jersey set a trend for concealing standard operating procedures for data entry and hygiene as if they were state secrets – especially when we are seeing persons registered three, four, five, and even six times,” Mr. Adams at PILF said. Mr. Adams serves as President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. He is also the founder of the Election Law Center, PLLC. According to PILF, the following discrepancies were found in the NJ voting roles:

  • 33,572 do not have a valid DOB or have odd placeholders in that date field. Most issues are in Essex (24%) and Middlesex(17%) counties.
  • 8,239 voters registered multiple times (2x to 6x) at the same address.
  • 6,863 do not show the date they registered. 95% are in Middlesex County.
  • 2,398 voters are over 105 years old, with DOB listed as 1917 or before.
  • 906 have neither a DOB nor the date they registered. Almost all are in Middlesex County.

One of the more unusual discoveries was evidence that credit for voting multiple times was assigned to some registrants in the 2020 General Election. Yet again, the NJ Secretary of State refuses to release any documentation, so there is no way to unravel what this discrepancy means. 

 According to the Jersey Journal, 105-year-old Patrick Depaola died on December 9, 2010, but somehow he remains an active voter in the state’s voting roles. 

 

This story syndicated with permission from For the Love of News