Early voting, long vote counts prompt delayed concessions, fraud accusations | Stile

In 1997, Jim McGreevey, the little-known state senator from Middlesex County, came within 26,000 votes — 1% of the vote — of toppling one of the Republican Party's rising stars, then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.

It was so close that state troopers were dispatched to his victory headquarters under the possibility that he would become the state's next governor. But instead, he conceded that night.

"It was a different time. Voting then was relatively straightforward,'' McGreevey recalled on Tuesday. "It was a simpler time."

Indeed, it was.

It was a time when voting by mail was limited to a tiny number of overseas citizens and members of the military.

It was a time when Donald Trump was still a struggling casino operator, not a politician pumping noxious and unproven claims of mass voter fraud into the nation's political bloodstream.

It was a time when enough workers could be found to staff polls across the state.

Twenty-four years later, Jersey finds itself in a strange, pandemic-era political limbo from this year's frenzied governor's race, with Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy edging by in a nail-biter over Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

It's now a time when every post-Election Day maneuver by both parties is magnified and interpreted into a Machiavellian, conspiratorial ploy to rob voters of their rightful choice.

It's now a time when the graceful concession speech, a ritual of reassurance for weary voters, may soon be a quaint relic of days gone by.

'Every vote is counted' versus 'every legal vote is counted'

In his concession speech, McGreevey wished Whitman well but asked that she and the GOP-controlled Legislature deal with the issues that he raised in the campaign.

"I ask that this state Legislature and this governor tackle the hard issues of concern to the middle-class families of New Jersey," McGreevey said at the time.

But Ciattarelli has refused to concede the race, insisting he won't do so until every "legal vote is counted" — roughly the same declaration that, ironically, Murphy made in his election night appearance in Asbury Park's Convention Hall.

"When every vote is counted, and every vote will be counted, we hope to have a celebration,'' the governor said to a small crowd of loyalists.

Murphy returned to the Convention Hall the next night to hold that celebration, even though every vote had not been counted. Still, the Associated Press called the race for Murphy as the results seesawed in his favor, with dimming prospects for Ciattarelli.

But Ciattarelli's stubborn refusal to face the inevitable has the Murphy campaign fuming and accusing the Republican challenger of irresponsibly stoking Trumpian suspicions of an election tainted by massive fraud. In doing so, he has proved himself to be just another ambitious Republican pandering to the "Stop the Steal" mania of the GOP base.

“Assemblyman Ciattarelli is mathematically eliminated, and he must accept the results and concede the race,” Murphy campaign manager Mollie Binotto wrote in a statement on Monday. “His continuing failure to do so is an assault on the integrity of our elections.”

Ciattarelli's campaign denies any such push, and Ciattarelli himself has urged voters not to buy into the fever-swamp conspiracies around the election.

His team says is it is simply conducting methodical due diligence in the face of an unusual set of circumstances, including the delay from post-election tallying of mail-in votes and a late cache of some 70,000 provisional votes cast at the polls.

The path is narrow for Ciattarelli, but his team is hoping that final tally might shrink Murphy's lead to around 1%, which might justify a recount.

"We're sitting here saying, 'Let's look at all the votes that allow us time to make a decision,' '' said Mark Sheridan, a lawyer for the Ciattarelli campaign. "If we don't think it's reasonable to ask for a recount, we're not going to. If we do, we are. We've been pretty candid and open about the 1% threshold. So we're not running around making crazy claims or anything like that."

As of early Tuesday afternoon, Murphy's lead had grown to 65,445, or a 2.4-point lead, according to Sheridan's figures. That lead expanded to 69,133 votes later in the day, according to a separate tally from Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, or 51% for Murphy to Ciattarelli's 48%. Sheridan said the campaign expects the vote count to be completed by Wednesday.

And then there's Sweeney

Senate President Stephen Sweeney, the Gloucester County Democrat dethroned by a furniture truck store driver who ran on a shoestring budget and — as we learned after the election — has a penchant for pumping out offensive, anti-Muslim tweets — is also refusing to concede his stunning, narrow loss.

Sweeney was expected to hold a news conference Tuesday, possibly to concede, but deferred as he was reportedly still waiting for the counting of votes "found" in one of the three South Jersey counties that his 3rd Legislative District includes. His claim of a post-election discovery of potentially 12,000 votes drew the attention of Fox News, the conservative outlet, which has stoked the voter fraud myth for months.

But in reality, claims of widespread voter fraud have not delayed the final results of these races. The issue is slow vote counting, caused by changes in state voting laws. Technical glitches in the first-ever early, in-person voting bogged down county clerks with delays and confusion.

More Stile: As Steve Sweeney departs the state Senate, where do Democrats go?

Last year, as part of Murphy’s order to offer universal mail in voting as a pandemic mitigation measure, county clerks were permitted to begin counting mail in ballots seven days before Election Day. But this year, that seven-day window was closed, forcing clerks to revert to the previous requirement of waiting till Election Day to begin counting.

And thousands of votes poured in at the last moment. Ballots postmarked on Nov. 2 had until Monday night to be counted. That slowed things even further.

In addition, the provisional ballots that the Ciattarelli campaign are counting on as their last reed of hope can't be counted until all the mail-in ballots are tallied. As of Tuesday afternoon, a nominal 4,600 mail-in ballots still had not been counted, Sheridan said.

So the wait continues. And Murphy's hopes for a narrow but clean victory with a slowly widening margin will have to wait.

"The irony is that's what cost Murphy his narrative,'' Rasmussen said. "The story would have been completely different if we had allowed clerks to count [mail-in ballots] seven days before the election."

The delay also holds challenges for Ciattarelli. Although he is likely to lose, he is now the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nod for governor in 2025, when there will be an open seat. He now has established statewide name recognition, something few Republicans can claim.

And after two terms of one party's control of the governor's office, voters are often ready to consider a switch. In short, Ciattarelli's promising future is very much like McGreevey's in 1997, when he came close to beating Whitman.

The last thing Ciattarelli wants is to have his brand associated with the "Stop the Steal" extremism by fighting a long-shot battle he probably can't win.

Charlie Stile is a veteran political columnist. For unlimited access to his unique insights into New Jersey’s political power structure and his powerful watchdog work, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: stile@northjersey.com

Twitter: @politicalstile

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ elections early voting leads to delayed ends | Stile