District 10 Challenger Claims Fraud in Newark Candidate's 1,081-Signature Petition

Newark Council President LaMonica McIver could not have obtained over 1,000 valid petition signatures for the District 10 special primary election in the approximately three-day time frame she certified that she did, an attorney for Congressional candidate Brittany Claybrooks argued in a challenge before Administrative Law court Judge Kim Belin on Thursday.

A ballot drawing for the special election, which will ultimately fill the vacant seat left by the April 24 death of U.S. Rep. Donald M. Payne Jr., is scheduled for Monday.

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A potential candidate must have at least 200 valid petition signatures, according to New Jersey statute. LaMonica McIver certified in her filing that Robin McIver collected the more than 1,000 signatures.

“That means that if one person, who circulated these petitions, didn’t sleep for essentially 36 hours and did nothing but get signatures on a petition, they would have needed to collect roughly one signature every two minutes in that time frame,” Matthew C. Moench, attorney with King, Moench & Collins LLP, said at the Zoom court hearing.

It’s common sense, he said, that they’re not collecting signatures at 2 a.m. “They have to sleep. There’s travel between locations,” said Moench, who is also the mayor of Bridgewater.

“That’s an awful lot of signatures for one person to collect in that time frame, which calls into question the certification that was submitted,” he said.

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“The handwriting and the way these forms were filled out were radically different,” Moench said. “If it’s one circulator, one would very reasonably assume that it’s going to be filled out very similarly for each person.”

Belin asked the parties to submit short summaries of their arguments to her office by 10 a.m. Friday. The ballot drawing happens at 3 p.m. on Monday.

“I will have my decision out before Monday,” Belin said.

In a letter to the state Division of Elections, Moench states that of McIver’s 1,081 petition signatures, “almost 900 are from voters who cannot be verified as living in the district, who failed to write down their address, who are registered with another party, or who are not registered to vote in the first place.”

Angelo J. Genova, the attorney representing McIver at the hearing, however, argued that Claybrooks “utterly failed to meet the burden” required to make the challenge.

“There is so much by way of conspiracy theories, so much by way of conjecture and speculation and how folks characterize events and try to put them in a place that suits their purposes and try to tell narratives that suit their agendas, and we can’t avoid the fact that we’re in a political context and the objection is being raised by a competitor to LaMonica McIver,” said Genova, of the firm Genova Burns LLC.

McIver did not testify at the hearing, nor was she in attendance. An email to the Central Ward councilwoman was not immediately returned following the hearing and a call to her office at City Hall just after 5 p.m. found the voicemail box was full.

McIver announced her candidacy for the District 10 seat on May 6, following endorsements from Mayor Ras J. Baraka and South Ward Councilman Patrick O. Council. In a Facebook post that evening, a smiling McIver shows herself holding up long yellow pages, next to the words “I’m LaMonica and I’m running for Congress! Petitions Are In!”

At the hearing, Genova said there are “at least” 200 signatures in McIver's support.

“This petition should proceed, and my client should be on the ballot,” he said. “But moving beyond that, you allowed for the advancement of a theory based on conjecture and speculation.”

In court papers, Moench argues the entire petition should be thrown out because of fraud.

“The significant issues raised here with regard to the fraudulent circulation of the petitioners must result in the invalidation of the entire petition,” he writes, citing case law stating that the best way to keep petitions fraud-free is to “let it be known that any taint of fraud will wholly invalidate them rather than merely set the court to the task of counting up the number.”

McIver is among 12 candidates who have filed petitions to run in the District 10 primary; six are from Newark.

Other District 10 candidates from New Jersey’s largest city are Democrats Darryl Godfrey, CEO of the New Jersey Redevelopment Authority; Alberta Gordon, a data engineering manager; Eugene D. Mazo, an associate professor of law and political science; Sheila Montague, a former mayoral candidate and community advocate; and “Warrior for the People” community activist Debra Salters.

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