registered voters
signed petition;
more names sought
Clerk: Not enough
registered voters
signed petition;
more names sought
By joyce blay
Staff Writer
Members of VOTE have failed in their initial bid to get certification of the required number of petition signatures they need to place a question on the November ballot asking Jackson voters to approve a change in government.
But that’s not the end of the story.
VOTE (Voters Organized To Elect our mayor) seeks to replace Jackson’s current government of five part-time Township Commit-tee members with a full-time, directly elected mayor and nine council members representing six wards. Three council members would be elected at large. Elections would be held in May, according to the VOTE proposal.
Township Clerk Ann Marie Eden announced the results of the certification process at Monday’s meeting of the Township Committee following a court-ordered count of the petition signatures submitted by VOTE.
The petition submitted to the clerk by the VOTE representatives contained 5,141 signatures prior to the certification process, said Eden, but only 3,938 signatures were validated as registered Jackson voters.
VOTE will now have 10 days to amend its petition by soliciting an additional 1,162 signatures to replace those that were not certified by Eden. She will then have five days to certify the replacement names.
A total of 5,100 signatures of registered Jackson voters — or 20 percent of the approximately 25,500 citizens who were registered to vote in November 2002 — will be required to place the question on the ballot in November.
"Would you please explain why you would disqualify a name?" Mayor Michael Kafton asked Eden during her presentation.
According to Eden, there were several reasons. She said 54 people signed their name more than once, which is not permitted. The clerk also said that 254 signatures did not match the names on file with the Ocean County Board of Elections.
In addition, the board had since deleted 29 names of voters previously registered to vote in Jackson, but who were no longer eligible to do so. Eden said the deletion was made for a variety of reasons. She also said that 254 signatures could not be verified as those of registered voters.
"If [a] William Peters signs as Bill, that’s understood, but a spouse cannot sign for the other spouse," Eden said. "If [the name isn’t legible] and can’t be linked to an address, [it] could not be determined" to be a registered voter of Jackson.
Eden said 866 signatures submitted by VOTE were not those of people registered to vote in Jackson. That group constituted the bulk of the signatures on the petition that were not certified, according to the clerk.
Despite the setback for the petition drive, members of the committee congratulated its proponents on collecting almost 4,000 valid signatures.
"I want to encourage the committee of petitioners to continue their efforts," Deputy Mayor Sean Giblin said.
The words of praise seemed at odds with the committee’s action in July when it unanimously adopted an ordinance that would have knocked VOTE’s question off the Election Day ballot and instead ask voters to approve the formation and election of officers to a charter study commission that would examine Jackson’s present form of government and options available to change it. The committee’s action was taken in spite of pleas by VOTE spokesman Robert Schiappacasse for time in which to complete the petition drive.
Since only one question may be asked of voters in November about a change in government, VOTE member Dennis Galvin, an attorney who was a township committeeman in the 1990s, filed a complaint against the committee and Eden in state Superior Court, Toms River.
He won a legal victory on Aug. 21 when Judge Frank A. Buczynski Jr. ruled that the township had to accept VOTE’s petition even though it had not been delivered by a prescribed deadline.
Municipal officials said they would not appeal the judge’s decision.
Members of VOTE were present at the committee’s meeting on Monday when Eden announced the number of signatures she had certified, but they left immediately after the announcement.
"I’m sure they’re [already working] on getting supplemental names," Giblin said.
According to Schiappacasse, that was indeed the case.
"We have 1,100 new signatures which we collected in the last week to 10 days," Schiappacasse told the Tri-Town News on Tuesday. "The town is just, I can’t tell you the level of support, it’s been just incredible. We’ll submit the supplemental petition on Sept. 18."
When asked if he had been surprised by the results of the certification process, Schiappacasse said that while he had expected a certain number of signatures to be invalidated, he did not expect as many as had been announced by Eden on Monday evening.
"We did not expect a quarter of the signatures to be thrown out, is what it comes down to," he said. "We anticipated based on past experience that 10 to 20 percent [would not be] certifiable and that [more] signatures [would] need to be obtained."
Despite the outcome, Schiappacasse said he remains optimistic.
"Certainly we would have liked not to have gone to court, but … every challenge we had to overcome, we overcame," he said. "We think our biggest challenge is to get this on the ballot in November and we think voters are going approve it."