Important information about county committee elections
This afternoon, Chairman Suleiman sent the following email to Atlantic County's Democratic Municipal Chairs:
Municipal Chairs,
As you may know, the New Jersey Democratic State Committee has recommended that all of the county organizations in the state postpone their county committee elections for one year due to the ongoing public health crisis. Chairman Currie convened a conference call with the 21 county chairs yesterday morning to discuss the State Party's recommendation. Additionally, Governor Murphy signed Executive Orders which institute "stay home" orders for residents and essentially prohibit the in-person collection of petition signatures. Given these measures, it appears likely that the June 2020 primary will be conducted exclusively with mail-in ballots, and it was discussed on the chairs call yesterday that efforts need to be made to alleviate the burden on county clerks and election officials as postponing the June 2 primary is not realistic. Furthermore, should this public health crisis still continue into June, the mass gatherings at polling places and reorganization meetings could greatly increase the spread of COVID-19.
Yesterday, after input from the Democratic State Committee's legal counsel Raj Parikh and ACDC solicitor Colin Bell, the ACDC Executive Committee passed the attached resolution which does the following:
Postpones county committee elections until June 2021.
Extends the terms of county committee members and executive officers for one year until June 2021.
Mandates that the county committee reorganization meeting will take place after the primary in June 2021 in accordance with state law.
Additionally, we strongly recommend the postponement of municipal committee reorganization meetings for one year and thus the terms of Municipal Chairs will be automatically extended for one year.
For those of you who have already turned in your county committee petitions, I apologize for the inconvenience this will cause. However, given the moratorium on canvassing, the prohibition on large gatherings by the Governor, and to alleviate the burdens on elections officials, postponing county committee elections is necessary given the serious public health crisis we face.
For those of you who still need to collect signatures for municipal partisan offices, the Secretary of State has developed a procedure to collect petition signatures electronically. Please visit the Division of Elections website and scroll down for more information. Given many city halls are closed to the public, please make arrangements with your municipal clerk to get your petition(s) over to him or her.
In closing, I want to make clear that we are following the recommendation of the State Party and we expect nearly every county in the State will do the same. We wanted to notify all of you first to process this information before we alerted the full county committee roster.
Please adhere to social distancing measures and stay home.
Sincerely,
Chairman Michael Suleiman
Atlantic County Democratic Committee