'Voting Anomalies Found By GOP Group Explained By NJ Clerk

ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — A Republican civic group in Essex County recently had some serious questions about local 2021 election results for the county clerk’s office. But according to an official, there’s a good explanation for the “voting anomalies” that the 100-year-old group saw online.

Here’s what the Essex County NJ Republican Women wrote on their website last week:

“The Essex County NJ Republican Women began examining the Essex County County Clerk website election results for the 2021 general election, and focused on the results for the major party gubernatorial candidates in comparison with the county voter registration records (January 2021), by voting district, in the 18 suburban (population density under 10,000 per square mile) towns of Belleville, Bloomfield, Caldwell, Cedar Grove, Essex Fells, Fairfield, Glen Ridge, Livingston, Maplewood, Millburn, Montclair, North Caldwell, Nutley, Roseland, South Orange, Verona, West Caldwell and West Orange (the higher-density Essex County towns of East Orange, Irvington, Newark and Orange are worthy of a separate analysis).”

According to the group:

“In a simple, back-of-a-napkin analysis, the organization found that the first active voting district of 16 of the 18 suburban towns exhibited data that was significantly out of proportion with the other districts in each town, and also had more voters in the general election, per the county’s website (albeit still marked ‘as of Nov. 4’ and ‘unofficial’ on November 12, 2021), than registered voters in January 2021. The Essex County election results website does not appear to offer a footnote or explanation for the anomalies.”

“The overage of votes vs. voters in the 16 communities was highest in West Orange and Montclair, where the Essex County website shows District 1-1 results for each town with five times as many votes tabulated as there are voters in the respective districts,” the Essex County NJ Republican Women wrote.

Read their full statement here.

COUNTY CLERK: ‘EACH VOTE HAS BEEN CORRECTLY TALLIED’

Essex County Clerk Christopher Durkin, who won re-election as a Democrat in 2020, didn’t dispute the accuracy of the group’s findings. But there’s an explanation that’s far from nefarious, he told Patch.

According to Durkin:

“There were 34 unique ballot styles for Essex County in the November 2, 2021, General Election. The total amount of votes cast both on Vote by Mail Ballots and on Early Voting Ballots were counted and placed in the first district of each municipality and legislative district. Currently, the programming only allows for those votes to appear in the first district along with the Election Day votes from that district.”

“Each vote that has been cast and counted up to this point for a candidate or ballot question has been correctly tallied to reflect the overall results,” Durkin said.

To support his explanation, Durkin shared a “Cards Cast Report” dated Nov. 12 with Patch (see below).

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