Of the 2,400 registered Republicans in Bernardsville, 500-700 of them received erroneous mail-in ballots, listing the Democratic candidates instead of the Republicans.
Gardner brought the issue to the Somerset County Republican Organization on June 13. The organization’s chairman Al Gaburo notified the county clerk who promised to remedy the mistake.
The error originated with Reliance Graphics, Inc., the printing company which sent out Somerset County’s ballots. Normally, the county clerk’s office prepares the ballots themselves, but shopped the task to Reliance this year because of Gov. Phil Murphy’s executive order that every voter receive a vote-by-mail ballot for the delayed July 7 primary election.
“If we had had a greater lead time when we were sending out these ballots, we would have been able to do the ballot insertion in-house and this error would have been caught,” Somerset County Clerk Steve Peter said.
Corrected ballots with a slip explaining the error were sent back out to all 2,400 Bernardsville Republicans on June 16. The erroneous ballots will be voided, and even so, Republican voters cannot cast votes for Democrats in a New Jersey primary. Reliance will swallow the reprinting and postage costs, at no added expense to taxpayers, Peter said.
