After Hillary Clinton delivered a speech earlier this month calling for the restoration and expansion of voting rights across the country, likely Republican presidential candidate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was quick to respond. “I don’t want to expand [early voting] and increase the opportunities for fraud,” he said, adding that “maybe that’s what Mrs. Clinton wants to do.”
While Christie has made it clear he would not support legislation to expand voting opportunities, his Democrat-controlled legislature is moving forward with it anyway. Democratic leaders plan to introduce and fast-track the “Democracy Act” this week which would make it the second state to adopt automatic voter registration and would expand early voting opportunities, among other changes.
“We’re not reinventing the wheel” said Analilia Mejia, the director of New Jersey Working Families, which spearheaded the initiative to have lawmakers introduce the legislation. “Most of these things have been moved and adopted in other states successfully… It’s just mind-bending that a governor of a state would be against every single one of his citizens having full ease and access to participate in the voting process.”
Christie asserted last week that Clinton “doesn’t know what she was talking about” when it comes to voting in New Jersey, but Mejia said “she totally does, otherwise New Jersey wouldn’t be 39th in the country in participation and registration. We wouldn’t be behind Mississippi.”
New Jersey currently ranks 39th in the country in both percentage of eligible voters who are registered and percentage of voters who actually case a ballot, according to NJWF. The state does not allow in-person early voting, but requires citizens who want to cast an absentee ballot early to apply for one at an election official’s office. New Jersey also does not permit online voter registration, something that is allowed in 33 other states.
The package of legislation will also include a bill that would ban governors from calling costly special elections, like the Senate race Christie ordered in 2013 which cost the state roughly $24 million. Around the same time Christie decided to spend millions of valuable taxpayer dollars on the special election, a move critics said he made in order to preserve his own seat, he vetoed a bill that would have let citizens vote 14 days before an election, calling the $25 million measure “hasty” and “counterproductive.” Meanwhile, Clinton has called for a minimum 20 days of early voting in each state.
The Democracy Act would also solve another problem plaguing New Jersey elections — the need to accommodate non-English speakers. Currently materials only have to be printed in Spanish if 10 percent of the county or voting districts speaks it as their primary language, but the bill would require election materials to be made available to voters in multiple languages without other stipulations, according to NJ Advance Media.
“It’s no wonder that our 21st century electorate is disengaged when our voting practices are stuck in the 17th century,” Frank Argote-Freyre, president of the Latino Action Network, said in a statement. “By modernizing voter registration practices and ensuring ballot materials are translated into languages that reflect our communities, we can dramatically improve voter accessibility and engagement.”
Mejia said that if Christie vetoes the bill, as NJWF expects him to do, the group plans to bring the issue directly to the voters on the next ballot. The move wouldn’t be unique for New Jersey voters — most notably, they previously acted without the governor’s support to raise the minimum wage through a constitutional amendment.