Video Loss From Brick Ballot Drop Box Just A Timing Issue, County Administrator Says

BRICK, NJ — An investigation by Ocean County officials into issues with surveillance video footage of the mail-in ballot drop box at the Brick Township municipal complex shows bad timing and a 30-day overwrite led to loss of the footage, County Administrator Carl Block said Monday.

“I don’t have any indication that Brick was involved in anything nefarious at all,” Block said, responding to questions about accusations made over the lost footage at the Ocean County Board of Commissioners meeting on March 23.

At that meeting, Gary Quinn, director of the commissioner board, implied foul play on the part of Brick Township officials during the 2021 election after the surveillance footage was found to be missing, according to an Asbury Park Press report on the commissioners’ meeting.

The implications arose from complaints after Republican Mary Buckley finished fourth in the race for three seats on the Brick Township Council in final, certified results.

Early tallies in the unofficial results showed Republican Perry Albanese, a lifelong Brick resident and former football star at Brick High School, leading all vote-getters. Buckley, a longtime Brick resident who was mostly unknown in political circles, was ahead of Democrats Marianna Pontoriero and Heather deJong in the race. Those tallies changed as mail-in ballots received Election Day and through Nov. 9 were counted.

Updates posted by 12:45 a.m. Nov. 3, just over four hours after the polls closed on Nov. 2, showed Buckley trailing, with 100 votes separating her from Pontoriero and deJong for the second and third seats.

Buckley alleges the change in the vote tally was the result of possible fraud with mail-in ballots, according to the Asbury Park Press report.

Ocean County has 19 secure drop boxes for vote-by-mail ballots that are monitored around the clock with video surveillance. All of them, except the Brick Township box, were at branches of the Ocean County library or other county buildings. The Brick drop box was moved earlier this month to the Brick branch of the library, which always had been the plan, Block said.

Quinn, at the commissioners meeting, bashed Brick officials and Mayor John Ducey over the lost surveillance footage, according to the Asbury Park Press report.

“Every other site except for Brick town hall was 100 percent exactly the way it was intended to be. We trusted Brick Township. We trusted the mayor in Brick Township. We trusted the fact that what they were telling us they were going to do was in fact being done,” the report quoted him as saying.

Ducey, in an email to Patch last Friday, called Quinn’s comments “misplaced criticism.”

“The video recording system in Brick Township worked properly throughout the 2021 election. It's a shame that he is so misinformed,” Ducey said.

Ducey said Brick’s video surveillance had a 30-day storage; after 30 days, recorded video is overwritten by new recordings, a common time limit on video surveillance recording systems.

Block said Ocean County officials first received an Open Public Records Act request for the video surveillance of all 19 drop boxes on Nov. 9, seven days after the Nov. 2 general election. Due to legal wrangling with the person who requested the footage, the county did not contact Brick about obtaining the video until Jan. 14, Block said, confirming information Ducey provided.

By Jan. 14, the Nov. 2 footage — and anything before then — was long gone.

“Commissioner Quinn could have made a simple phone call or email, or even come to town hall in person, for a copy of the video anytime within 30 days of the election,” Ducey said. "Commissioner Quinn should look in the mirror for the blame rather than make false innuendos about trust against others.”

“I do not know why Commissioner Quinn dragged me into this matter and I hope he works to get the County's election procedures fixed," Ducey said.

Brick Township has been controlled by the Democrats since 2013, when now-Mayor John G. Ducey and three other Democrats took office after sweeping four council seats in the 2012 election. Ducey was elected mayor the following year, and is in his third term. Local Republicans have tried to challenge the Democrats’ hold but Ducey has proven to be popular with residents across the political spectrum; in November, he won re-election by more than 7,500 votes.

Residents who supported Buckley’s campaign, however, questioned how she could have lost and the mail-in ballots, which have been the focus of fraud accusations across the country since the 2020 election, became the focus of complaints.

Anna Lichnowski, a Brick resident and friend of Buckley, filed the OPRA request for the video surveillance footage of all of the vote-by-mail drop boxes. In a YouTube video posted Jan. 18, she said she is convinced fraud happened in the Brick election surrounding the mail-in ballots.

Ocean County election officials have repeatedly said the mail-in ballot system is secure. The clerk’s office says each ballot comes with an envelope that has codes linking it to the voter, and returned ballots are verified by signature and those codes. The verification process is the same whether the voter drops the ballot in the U.S. mail or at a drop box.

Critics have complained that ballots mailed to people who no longer live at an address, or who had changed names due to marriage, mean the system is ripe for fraud.

Lichnowski, in her video, said her belief that fraud occurred was increased because mail-in ballots were counted Election Night and beyond.

Under New Jersey law, vote-by-mail ballots that were postmarked by 8 p.m. on Election Day had seven days to reach the Board of Elections and be counted. Vote-by-mail ballots could be dropped in the drop boxes until 8 p.m. on Election Day, and the sealed ballots from those boxes were collected by a two-person team of election officials that consisted of one Democrat and one Republican and taken to the Board of Elections.

Lichnowski questioned why “all” the mail-in ballots had not been counted by Election Day, citing the 2020 election. In 2020, the vast majority of mail-in ballots were processed and counted before Election Day because New Jersey was voting almost entirely by mail-in ballot.

In 2021, voters in New Jersey were able to return to their polling places and in Ocean County, the number who voted by mail averaged about 18 percent. In Brick, 16 percent of the ballots cast in 2021 – 4,485 out of 27,670 – were vote-by-mail ballots. In the council race, Albanese received 13,861 votes, Pontoriero received 13,415 votes, deJong received 13,403, and Buckley received 13,137 votes. Democrat Derrick T. Ambrosino, who was seeking his first term, received 13,129, and Republican Ernest C. Arians received 13,016, according to the results certified Nov. 20.

Block said Lichnowski’s initial OPRA request for the video surveillance of all the Ocean County elections drop boxes from the 2020 and 2021 elections was rejected. Block said the county rejected it because the 2020 election was more than a year past and the video, which had been kept for a year, was no longer, and there were security and privacy concerns about the 2021 video surveillance.

Lichnowski, in an email to Patch, said her first OPRA request was filed Oct. 11, 2021, and specified the 2020 video footage only.

"Note that at the time, it was not in fact 'more than a year past' the 2020 Presidential election," Lichnowski said, adding she was told by the records custodian at the county Board of Elections that the video surveillance was only kept for 30 days after the election.

Lichnowski said that is a failure to follow federal and state election laws. Federal law requires presidential election records to be kept for 22 months, and New Jersey election rules require vote-by-mail ballots to be kept for two years.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that if 'vote by mail ballots' themselves must be retained for 2 years, the mandatory surveillance footage that exists to ensure the integrity of their delivery, chain of custody, etc. must also be retained for 2 years," Lichnowski said. "There are NO election records that are permitted to be destroyed 30 days after an election, and they are not classified as typical 'public records.' "

Lichnowski filed suit over the OPRA request denial.

Block said in the days that followed, the county rescinded the denial on the 2021 recordings, but told Lichnowski it would cost $4,000 to provide the records, because of the number of hours it would take to gather and copy the footage. That number later was reduced to $2,500, Block said, and he ordered the county’s information technology staff to gather the video.

State law governing the Open Public Records Act allows government agencies to charge for copies of information in cases where the requests are extensive and time-consuming to fulfill.
It was as the county staff gathered the video they learned the Brick municipal footage no longer existed.

“If we’re going to continue to have drop boxes and we’re going to continue to have (mail-in) ballots, there has to be a change,” Buckley said at the commissioners’ meeting, the Asbury Park Press report said. “And I don’t understand why we were delayed answers for so long. … You had to know that these films didn’t exist or that they were lost.”

Block, at the commissioners' meeting, said he and his staff were investigating. The Asbury Park Press report said the entire municipal complex lost power, causing the loss of the video surveillance.

Block said that initial information was not correct. In discussions with Brick administrator Joanne Bergin, Block said he was told three of the four video surveillance system’s hard drives in Brick were corrupted sometime after the 2020 election. The video surveillance programming at that time had been set to save videos for a year, Block said.

Brick had to replace those ruined hard drives and reload the software for the video surveillance system, Block said. When the software was loaded onto the new drives, it defaulted to the 30-day recording and overwriting, Block said.

“They did not realize it at the time that it defaulted to 30 days,” Block said. “There is nothing that indicates to me that there was anything nefarious going on. It was just a timing issue.”

Block said New Jersey's rush to implement the widespread vote-by-mail balloting in the midst of the pandemic created some of the issues that have led to persistent questions and frustrations on the part of voters who believe the 2020 election was stolen, even in the face of Republican officials on local, state and national levels refuting that claim.

While Quinn implied moving the Brick drop box was punitive and done because the video footage was lost, Block said putting it at town hall always was a temporary solution, necessitated because the Brick branch of the Ocean County Library could not be outfitted in time before the 2020 election with cameras and other measures needed to keep the box secure.

It had remained at the Brick municipal building in 2021 while Ocean County officials got the video surveillance in place, and Block said he was grateful for the assistance of Brick officials during that time.

“Now that we have everything in place and have the concrete pad poured, it’s been moved,” Block said.

Block contends the state statute isn't explicit about how long video surveillance of the drop boxes must be kept, noting it provides specific guidance for other records relating specifically to the election. There are other issues that need to be addressed to make the vote-by-mail process run more smoothly.

"In Washington (state) they have been voting by mail for years," Block said, adding election officials in that state have the technology needed to handle the much higher volume of vote-by-mail ballots and the systems and legislative procedures in place that allow for efficient elections.

"Our legislature has to fix this," Block said.

Lichnowski said the responsibility is on the county, and no one else.

"They can all continue to point fingers, but at the end of the day, the County Election Board, the Commissioners, and the Sheriff are directly responsible for the conduct of our elections," she said. "They have neglected their duties as public officials and should be removed for failing to abide by laws and rules that ensure the integrity of our most sacred democratic process."

"I have never accused them of foul play or election fraud, but I am making a very compelling case that they're inept in substantiating that there wasn't fraud with our mail-in ballots," Lichnowski said.

Note: This article has been updated with comment from Anna Lichnowski.

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