New Jersey voters sue after GOP officials target Democrats for removal ahead of midterms

New Jersey voters sued Ocean County election officials Thursday, seeking to stop a GOP-led purge of Democratic and unaffiliated voters ahead of the November midterms.

The lawsuit, filed in Mercer County Superior Court, names the Ocean County Board of Elections and its chairman, George Gilmore, as defendants. It was brought by the League of Women Voters of New Jersey and three Bay Head residents, all of whom received letters questioning their eligibility to vote. 

The ACLU of New Jersey warned Ocean County last month that it would sue unless officials halted the voter challenge process and assured affected voters their registrations would remain active

The now filed lawsuit escalates a controversy first reported last week, when a local Republican official compiled a list of Bay Head voters whose property tax bills were mailed outside the borough.

The list contained 39 voters, all of them Democrats or unaffiliated. No Republicans appeared on it.

Dennis Shaning, president of both the Bay Head Borough Council and Bay Head GOP, sent the list to county election officials and said those voters “should not be voting in Bay Head.”

Soon afterward, Gilmore — who chairs both the Ocean County Board of Elections and the Ocean County Republican Organization — sent the flagged voters letters requiring them to complete a detailed “Domicile Questionnaire” and warning that their “right to vote may be challenged” in the Nov. 3 election. 

The lawsuit alleges that the county simply reproduced Shaning’s partisan targeting.

In one particularly stark example cited in the complaint, a Democratic voter received a challenge letter while their Republican spouse, who lived in the same household, did not.

The questionnaire itself asked voters to provide extensive personal information. According to the complaint, it contained 16 numbered questions, more than 30 individual requests and four demands for documentation, including questions about boat ownership and the names of voters’ children. 

Voters were also given another option: sign a “Letter of Removal” asking to be taken off Ocean County’s voter rolls. 

The plaintiffs say the process has already intimidated and burdened voters.

One of the voters suing, Ada Draesel, has owned a Bay Head home for 53 years and has voted at the same polling place for decades. Her tax documents are sent to her daughter and son-in-law, who help manage her finances.

The lawsuit says she received five or six copies of the board’s questionnaire and later received a phone call from the board asking personal questions, leaving her feeling “confused and distraught.” 

Meanwhile, Scott Colby, another plaintiff, moved back to Bay Head full time after retiring. He says he spent days gathering documents to prove his residency and now worries that even a provisional ballot he casts might not be counted.

The timing is especially consequential.

The board has scheduled an Oct. 13 meeting to review the voters’ eligibility — the same day as New Jersey’s registration deadline for the Nov. 3 election.

The lawsuit argues that voters removed after that meeting could be left unable to register elsewhere in time to vote in November.

The lawsuit accuses the board of violating New Jersey’s newly enacted John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act, as well as the state constitution’s equal protection and voting rights guarantees.

It alleges that the board’s actions amount to voter intimidation and unequal treatment because only Democratic and unaffiliated voters were subjected to the residency inquiry. 

Gilmore, a longtime Ocean County Republican power broker, has previously defended the process, arguing that the board routinely responds to challenges submitted to it rather than independently searching for voters. He was convicted in 2019 on two counts of failing to turn over payroll taxes withheld from employees and one count of making false statements on a bank loan application. He was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and three years of supervised release. President Donald Trump granted him a full pardon in January 2021.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to intervene before Tuesday’s meeting and bar the board from deciding the voters’ eligibility based on party affiliation, tax mailing addresses, questionnaire responses or failure to attend the hearing. They also want the court to prohibit the county from forcing those voters to cast provisional ballots on those grounds and to declare the process unlawful.