Glenn van Lier Brookside Lane
Some consolation can be gained from digesting the voter tallies from last November’s election results.
Our fellow citizens here in Hillsborough are slowly realizing that our elected officials in the form of Republican Committeemen Anthony Ferrera, Carl Suraci and Robert Wagner, simply cannot be trusted.
This distrust carries up through the Somerset County Freeholders and as high as Pete Biondi, our state Assemblyman. Let’s look at the actual numbers.
This is now and has always been a very conservative town in a conservative county. The voters overwhelmingly vote Republican in Hillsborough, although that has been moving to the left slowly the last 10 years.
Voters selected Republican Kip Bateman for State Senate by more than 1,300 votes over Democrat Wayne Fox; 4,596 voters pressed Kip Bateman’s button last November.
Here’s the really interesting thing: roughly 650 of the voters who selected Republican Bateman, switched their vote locally to vote for Democrat Paul Drake.
In this solidly Republican town, Mr. Drake lost by a mere 40 votes out of nearly 8,000 total votes cast.
When 650 people push the Republican button in the voting booth at the top of the ticket and then move over to press the Democrat button further down, it’s a powerful message.
Why would voters move their fingers away from the GOP column as they move down the ballot?
The voters are happy with Republican leadership in the State Senate, apparently, but as we get closer to local politics and governing, the voters are increasingly unhappy. There is good reason as I’ve outlined many times.
Assemblyman Biondi was mayor of Hillsborough for many years and still lives in Hillsborough. More than 100 voters who picked Mr. Bateman did not vote for Mr. Biondi but voted against him.
At the county level, likely due to the Parks Commission scandal, Republican Pat Walsh got about 600 less votes than Mr. Bateman.
Here in Hillsborough, Republican Frank DelCore got even fewer votes than Pat Walsh. Obviously there is a huge amount of distrust in the voters’ minds.
There is a relatively good set of data that can be used to peer into the minds of the voters who are more informed than the average voter. Those who use absentee ballots obviously know enough to apply for the ballot and are willing to go through the extra effort to register their votes.
Absentee ballots show similar support for Mr. Bateman, that slides off lower on the ballot as the general tallies did.
However, here in Hillsborough, the Democratic candidate received more votes than the Republican candidate, and the change of government question, Q5, was approved by a 54 percent to 46 percent margin.
This is another strong message from the voters of Hillsborough.
Perhaps our friends and neighbors are finally waking up and starting to vote for honesty, integrity, and competence instead of simply voting for their party.
We’ll keep our eyes open.
