Credit: (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Gov. Phil Murphy and Jack Ciattarelli agreed on very little this year, but now both of their campaigns are on the same page on one issue: New Jersey needs uniform rules for how counties tally and report election results.

Confusion continues to cloud the vote count in the tight race between Murphy and Ciattarelli, with New Jersey’s home-rule system of tallying and reporting results making it impossible to know easily where and how many ballots are outstanding. As of 8:38 p.m. Thursday, Murphy had a 2.3-point lead over Ciattarelli, representing about 47,000 votes, according to The Associated Press, which called the race for the incumbent Wednesday night.

As Ciattarelli’s election night lead became a deficit that slowly grew Wednesday, his chief strategist Chris Russell said staffers were “frustrated” as they tried to determine county by county where early in-person votes and mail-in ballots had been tallied and if those counts were included in the reports posted by county clerks.

Social media rumors

But both campaigns said greater uniformity and clarity in reporting would go a long way toward quashing rumors of potential election fraud, which, like the one following last year’s presidential vote, have become rampant on social media. Some claimed Bergen County vote totals were evidence of wrongdoing. At one point the results showed Ciattarelli winning with most or all precincts counted, although Murphy wound up winning the county by about five points once the mail-in ballots were added to the totals.

Ciattarelli himself took to Twitter Thursday night in a video some saw as a statesmanlike attempt to stop conspiracy rumors from spreading, while others saw it as laying the groundwork for potentially challenging the results. By law, he can ask for a recount but would have to cite election irregularities and get a judge to agree and order it. In the video, Ciattarelli said Murphy declared victory, prematurely.

“There are still tens of thousands of vote-by-mail and provisional ballots yet to be counted,” he said. “No one should be declaring victory or conceding the election until every legal vote is counted.”

Ciattarelli said the decision on whether to seek a recount would come “at the very end of the counting process.” While most of the votes should be counted by early next week, the tallying won’t officially end until Nov. 13, which is the last day counties can accept “cure letters” from people whose mail-in or provisional ballots were rejected due to a signature mismatch.

“I don’t want people falling victim to wild conspiracy theories or online rumors … Please don’t believe everything you see or read online,” Ciattarelli said. “You can report any perceived or real irregularity to the voter integrity hotline set up by the NJ GOP … What’s most important is for everyone to be patient and let the process play out.”

Count before announcing winner

Eric Arpert, Ciattarelli’s campaign manager, said the lack of clarity only bolsters the campaign’s call for “counting all the votes” before declaring a winner.

“I do think that there’s the opportunity, upon reflection and perhaps in hindsight, to clean up this system, particularly to give folks confidence that every vote is being counted,” he said.

“It’s very, very frustrating,” Murphy campaign spokesman Jerrel Harvey said Wednesday afternoon, before AP called the race for Murphy when there were fewer than 20,000 votes separating the men. “It’s not fair for either campaign to sit here in limbo … There should be a uniform process for counting these.”

Campaigns have long known how to read Election Day returns based on which precincts had been counted and which were outstanding. But the widespread use of mail-in ballots — so far, close to 578,000 people used them in this election — and early in-person voting this year have complicated the process of figuring out whether a candidate still has a chance as the results are being tallied and made public.

“Especially with vote-by-mail now being sprinkled in, you don’t know where they’re (votes) coming from,” said Mike DuHaime, who was chief strategist to former GOP Gov. Chris Christie. “I used to be able to look at literally probably one or two precincts and tell you what was going to happen in the whole state. In 2009, I saw Christie won Woodbridge and South River and I said, ‘The race is over.’ … But now, you don’t know because the vote-by-mail is so different from the machine ballots.”

State law allowed county election officials to begin scanning the mail-in ballots on the morning of Election Day and to tally the counts being stored in the early voting machines when polls close. But not every county did this and there was no way to know whether the statewide totals being constantly updated by AP, which is widely used by news media to report the status of the race, included those early votes. The only way to tell was to consult each county’s website and even then, it might take digging to figure out.

What’s being tallied?

Getting results for the counties was confusing because some included early and mail-in ballots in their totals, while others reported them separately. To get a full count, each had to be added together. Sussex County’s election results website stated, “The new EARLY VOTING equipment has a different tabulation system than the Election Day equipment, so results had to be provided in two separate reports.”

While a few counties specified whether these were included in their totals, many did not, and Middlesex County does not even give the option of downloading detailed data that would show counts of early votes by machine or paper ballot.

Some counties are adding mail-in ballots as they are received to their totals, though the only way to know that is to notice that one day’s tallies are different from the prior report. Other appear to still not have processed all the mail-in ballots on hand by Election Day and haven’t even started to count those that have been trickling in over the past two days — all ballots postmarked by Nov. 2 will be counted if received by Monday. The Monmouth County election reporting site stated Thursday night that “89% of Election Night Mail-In Ballots” had been processed, while late ballots were pending, while Morris County stated that mail-in and provisional ballots were “pending.”

“It would be helpful if the county clerks were more forthcoming about what’s uncounted and still coming in,” tweeted Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, on Thursday, “but they are also understaffed and under-tech’d for the 21st century.”

In some counties, election staff work long hours providing continual updates. In others, officials work until a certain time and go home, leaving a number of Election Day precincts, and now, an unknown number of mail-in ballots, uncounted.

Not always like clockwork

“Some decide to move at their own pace,” Russell said. “Some work like clockwork, some work like a broken clock.”

Harvey said the counting and reporting of results, given the popularity of early voting, is “something that needs to be revisited,” possibly through legislation. Russell said it would “make sense for someone in the Legislature to suggest that there be some continuity, a framework for how this is all recorded.”

There is obviously public pressure, from local candidates anxious to know whether they have won, as well as statewide candidates, to get clear and timely results. But the only rules for county officials to report full results require that county boards of canvassers meet by Nov. 15 to certify results and then to send them to the secretary of state by Nov. 20.

Secretary of State Tahesha Way advised patience.

“County election officials are working diligently to ensure all votes are counted,” she said Thursday. “Once all votes have been counted, the counties will provide the results to the state in order to certify the 2021 General Election.”