ELEC

Dr. Frederick Herrmann, the longtime Executive Director of the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission, has announced his retirement.

"The essence of Democracy is an informed electorate," begins the mission statement of New Jersey's Election Law Enforcement Commission, but much of the information on ELEC's website has been off-limits to a significant portion of the electorate for years, and there are no plans to change that.

I'm not even talking about the clunky interface and seemingly random functionality. If you have that much access, consider yourself lucky.

Since at least 2005, ELEC has been aware that "Browsers such as Firefox and Netscape are not supported through our search engines."

In 2007, the only visible change to their help page was the inclusion of another unsupported platform: "At this time, the Macintosh platform and browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Netscape are not supported through our search engines."

Currently only the Internet Explorer browser is supported, and only on Windows (the old version of IE on Macs is not supported). The market share of IE, which has been declining since 2003, is now around 75 percent, which means that about one in four users would not be able to access the information they are searching for.

While trying to do some research, I called ELEC to explain that I am on a Macintosh computer and ask how I could access their information. According to the IT director, they don't have any plans to make the information available to those on the currently unsupported platforms.

Dr. Frederick Herrmann, the longtime ELEC Executive DirectorFrom time to time, the New Jersey legislature will pass new regulations to constrain politicians' behavior, such as the pay-to play laws and the proposed clean elections law that would result in public financing of campaigns.  But the Election Law Enforcement Commission, the regulatory agency charged with monitoring compliance is not receiving funding increases equal to these new responsibilities.

Just ask Democratic State Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Teaneck), who had to amend the governor's fiscal 2009 budget in May to stop the state from cutting $750,000 in funding from ELEC's administrative budget in order to give it a more modest cut of $250,000, to $4.647 million.

"What I did was lobby, and state in front of the state government committee how important I thought it was," Weinberg said. "It was nothing heroic.  I was just calling attention to the facts here."

Republican State Sen. Bill Baroni (R-Hamilton), who teaches election and campaign finance law at Seton Hall Law School, also pushed for the reinstatement of funding, although he believed that no funding should have been cut whatsoever. When the cuts were first announced in April, Baroni wrote a letter to Gov. Jon Corzine about ELEC's budget troubles, including its inability to fill 21 vacancies in its staff with present funding levels.

Gov. Jon Corzine today nominated Amos Saunders, a 76-year-old retired Superior Court Judge from Passaic County, to serve as the new Republican member of the Election Law Enforcement Commission. The Republican seat has been vacant since December 2006. Corzine’s last attempt to fill it was in October 2007, when his nomination of Gabriella Morris was quickly withdrawn after realizing that Morris, who handles government affairs for Prudential, could not hold the post because ELEC also regulates lobbyists.

Today is Election Day in several hundred municipalities across the state that elect school board members – an appropriate time to remind Gov. Jon Corzine that a vacancy still exists on the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission.  Three months ago, Corzine’s staff indicated that the appointment of a Republican ELEC member would come “within weeks or even days.”  The seat has been vacant since Corzine named Judge Theodore Davis to serve as the Chief Operating Officer of Camden in December 2006.