Mercer County, NJ Residents File Lawsuit Against Election Officials Over Voter Disenfranchisement
Dominion Voting Systems Error Rendered All Tabulators Inoperable on Election Day
Ten residents of Mercer County, New Jersey, have taken their grievances to the Superior Court, alleging severe voter disenfranchisement due to a series of errors linked to Dominion Voting Systems and the handling of the 2022 and 2023 elections.
On February 14th, the group lodged a hefty 360-page complaint, laden with evidence, detailing the systematic failures that stripped them of their fundamental voting rights.
The complaint, accessible at Wefer Law Offices, exposes the extent of the mishaps that occurred during the recent elections.
The lawsuit highlights that in 2022, a crucial technical error by Dominion Voting Systems rendered all tabulators inoperable when they failed to update ballot IDs after the County made changes to the ballot layout. This significant oversight was initially kept from the public by County officials and only surfaced following public insistence on an explanatory hearing.
The complaint paints a chaotic scene on election day, exacerbated by subsequent egregious handling and counting of ballots. The plaintiffs argue that these actions infringed upon the civil, statutory, and constitutional rights of the voters of Mercer County, thereby invalidating the election results.
According to the complaint:
In 2022, Mercer County voters were supposed to vote by paper ballot and the ballots were supposed to be scanned into tabulating machines at the polling location. However, the tabulating machines throughout the entire county failed to work on Election Day, November 8, 2022.
The tabulating machines are manufactured by Dominion Voting Machines (“Dominion”). Upon information and belief, the reason the tabulating machines did not work is because Dominion failed to update the numbering of ballots after a change was requested by the Mercer County Clerk, so the tabulators did not recognize the ballots as legitimate.
The failure of the tabulating machines only affected the manner in which the paper ballots would be collected and tabulated. It should not have affected any qualified voters’ ability to cast a regular ballot.
The District Boards are responsible for tallying, certifying, and reporting election results to the public unless the County has designated a counting center for votes to be tabulated.
The BOE and Superintendent of Elections apparently did not have protocols in place in the event a polling place tabulator did not work, had failed to train District Board members on what to do in the event of machine malfunction, and had failed to train county workers and District Board members on how to handle paper ballots in a manner consistent with maintaining chain of custody, performing their statutory duties, and ensuring a secure election.
From the time the polls opened at 6am to approximately 8am, voters throughout Mercer County were instructed by the District Board workers, to vote provisionally when they should have been voting by regular ballot.
Upon information and belief, the instruction to have qualified voters cast votes by provisional ballot was relayed to District Board workers by Nathaniel Walker, the Superintendent of Elections at the time and other Mercer County election authorities.
As a result, voters in this time period had their ballots wrongly subjected to the additional scrutiny of adjudication by the County Board of Elections and at least 759 voters were disenfranchised and their votes were not counted due to “voting by machine” when the Defendant BOE and each of its Defendant Commissioners knew that it was impossible for these voters to have voted by machine.
Because there were no protocols for the proper handling of the paper ballots and because District Board workers were not trained on how to handle paper ballots, chain of custody was not preserved on many, perhaps most, ballots in Mercer County for the 2022 election cycle.
Entire bags of votes were misplaced, bags and machines containing ballots were not properly sealed, and at least 1500 ballots were found left behind in tabulators six days after the election.
The final numbers for the election are unknown and unknowable. The numbers Mercer County certified differ from those it reported to the state voter history files by thousands of votes and this discrepancy remains unresolved.
Key points from the lawsuit regarding the 2022 election include:
- The improper move to provisional ballots and recording errors concerning these ballots resulted in at least 759 voters having their votes rejected when they should have been accepted. These voters were disenfranchised.
- Other voters do not know if their vote was counted as the electronic poll books do not show them as having checked in.
- Entire bags of votes were misplaced, bags and machines containing ballots were not properly sealed, and at least 1,500 ballots were found left behind in tabulators six days after the election. Chain of custody was destroyed.
- No tally sheets were created contrary to state statute.
- The counting of votes was not continuous and public contrary to state statute.
- There is a 4,849-vote discrepancy between the number of votes the County reported to the public and the number of Election Day votes the County reported to the State and this discrepancy has not been resolved.
A highlight of the orders demanded include:
- better poll worker training
- prevention of all identified machine and polling book failures from recurring in future elections
- public reconciliation of ballots by type for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 primary and general elections
