Avoiding the next Bob Menendez

A weird quirk in New Jersey ballots might have prevented his ouster in 2018.

Senator Bob Menendez is in the media spotlight for evidence of spectacular corruption. Although he has been accepted in New Jersey political life for decades, an important reform can give voters more power to avoid making a similar mistake in the future.

Incumbent politicians in New Jersey are nearly invincible, thanks to an antiquated nominating system called the County Line (we’ve written about it before here). In this system. a county party’s favored choices appear together in a single row or column on the ballot. Since 2009, no legislative incumbent with the county line throughout their district has lost a primary election. The same is true of state and federal races. 

The goal of sound ballot design principles is to minimize voting errors and bias. However, New Jersey primary ballots are antithetical to these design principles. The County Line is basically a trick that county clerks play on the brains of voters. 

The brain’s visual processing systems prefer names listed first, clustered near one another, or arranged in an orderly line. Such preferences are independent of the merits of candidates. The clerk who designs a County Line ballot nudges the voter toward a choice, much like a card trick in which a subject can be induced to pick a particular card from a presented deck.

An example of the county line is shown in column A.

Partisan polarization makes most districts a shoo-in for whoever gets nominated. Indeed, only 13 New Jersey incumbent state legislators have lost their primary races since 2001, and of those, 10 had been denied the ballot County Line by party organizations. It could be argued that these candidates were weak, and party officials were doing the work of screening them. But considering the subconscious effects of the ballot County Line, New Jersey party bosses give voters little say in who wins.

When elected officials are answerable only to party officials, they face no consequences from voters. In 2015, the Washington Post found that New Jersey politicians break the law at the highest rate of any state, over 50 crimes per 1,000 politicians. Senator Menendez seems like he might be poised to make a substantial contribution to the next update of that statistic. 

Senator Menendez may be the most prominent beneficiary of the ballot County Line. The last time he was on trial for corruption, party officials stuck with him, endorsing him for renomination in 2018 - and letting him retain the ballot County Line. Nonetheless, a little-known challenger, Lisa McCormick, still won 38% of the vote. Such a protest vote revealed enthusiasm among rank-and-file Democratic voters to be rid of Menendez . But to cast their vote, they had to overcome a manipulative ballot design. 

Indeed, the ballot County Line may have saved Menendez’s political career in 2018. Based on analysis of data from New Jersey Policy Perspective, candidates who had the party endorsement performed an average of 35 points better in counties where they had the ballot line compared with other counties where they did not. Even the smallest advantage was 13 points. This is known as a natural experiment, where the candidate is the same but one thing is different: the physical arrangement on the ballot gives a boost beyond a simple party endorsement. Indeed, in counties that did not use the county line, Lisa McCormick actually got more votes than Senator Menendez, by a margin of 56% to 44%. It is plausible that without the county line, Senator Menendez might have been turned out of office five years ago.

We cannot be entirely certain whether Menendez would have been ousted in a fair election in 2018. Irrespective of his many scandals, he is one of the best-known political figures in the state. We do know that Governor Murphy (as well as Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) have now called for him to resign, suggesting that the party might be ready at last to take away their endorsement. But that’s closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

If New Jersey politicians are serious about preventing the rise of the next Bob Menendez, they’ll pass a law doing away with the County Line. By bringing New Jersey primaries into line with other states, they will do away with an antiquated mechanism and help the Garden State catch up with modern standards for fair elections.

Sam Wang is director of the Electoral Innovation Lab and professor of neuroscience at Princeton University.