On most ballots, Daggett's name will be hard to find

Independent candidate Christopher Daggett is running for governor of New Jersey, but voters in most counties will have to look in "Siberia" to find him on the ballot.

Daggett will stand next to Gov. Jon Corzine and Republican Christopher Christie during tonight's televised debate.  He raised enough money to qualify for public financing from the state, won the endorsement of a major environmental group and garnered 12% support in a Quinnipiac University poll.  But unlike Christie and Corzine, who each automatically receive either the first or second position on each county's ballot, Daggett had to try his luck in random drawings for ballot placement with the nine other gubernatorial candidates who do not belong to a major party - none of whom have been able to demonstrate any widespread support for their campaigns. 

In most counties, that relegates him to an obscure ballot position that election watchers jokingly compare to the vast, remote Russian region of Siberia. 

"It certainly represents a challenge, and it shows again how the system is stacked by the two parties against independent candidates," said Daggett's policy director, Mark Magyar. 

Daggett caught a break in two counties: Bergen, the state's most populous, and Gloucester.  In both places, voters will find his name at the top of the ballot's third column - just to the right of Christie's. 

But in Ocean and Atlantic Counties, voters looking for Daggett's name will have to scour the ballot to find him in the second row of the seventh column - the last possible spot (a staffer from the Atlantic County clerk's office joked that "It just worked out that way. Sorry.")   In Hunterdon County, voters have to look past nine candidates before they get to Daggett's name.  And in Warren County, Daggett is the 9th name to appear in the third row- right between candidates Jason Cullen and Joshua Leinsdorf.

Upset not only by his personal disadvantage but by the principle of awarding major party candidates the top two spots, Daggett last month filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the practice.  It fell through when a Superior Court judge refused to hear it before November.

Montclair State University Professor Brigid Harrison said bad ballot placement will probably cost Daggett some votes, but not more than 1%.

"People who are going out to the polls to vote for Chris Daggett are sophisticated enough that they're going to find his name and vote for him," she said.  "It really is more about prestige and legitimacy.  Despite the fact that Daggett qualified for matching funds and is participating in the debates, people are going to have to hunt and peck to find him in many of the counties."

Moreover, independent candidates historically have worse showings on election day than in the polls.  In the Quinnipiac poll that showed Daggett at 12%, pollsters did not name any of the other independent or third party candidates.  Unlike in the poll, the anti-major party candidate vote could be diffused between all 10 alternative candidates.

Conservative political consultant Rick Shaftan knows the ins and outs of ballot placement from experience.  In 1997, he ran Murray Sabrin's publicly funded Libertarian candidacy.  In counties where Sabrin drew a decent position, he got decent results.  Not so in counties were he was in an obscure spot on the ballot. 

“In Morris County it mattered incredibly.  We were buried in a place nobody could find us and you could see it in the election returns," said Shaftan, who most recently ran Steve Lonegan's Republican gubernatorial primary campaign against Christie.  

In Bloomingdale, Shaftan said, Sabrin got seven or eight percent of the vote.  But that was in Passaic County, where Sabrin had decent ballot position.  Just across the border in Butler, a town demographically similar to Bloomingdale but in Morris County, Sabrin got about 2%. 

But if Daggett doesn't do as well on election day as he did in the Quinnipiac poll, it could be because the race between Corzine and Christie is close.  Tight races almost always mean fewer protest votes, Shaftan said. 
Magyar, however, says that his own data shows that they campaign are pulling from Corzine in Democratic areas and Christie in Republican areas.

"It's more informed than simply I don't like the other two," he said.

Magyar said that the campaign has a "simple" strategy for dealing with the ballot placement problem.  But it also gives them an issue that reinforces what Daggett has said on the stump.

"Frankly in a way it plays into some of the themes of our campaign: running against the establishment and the two-party system," he said.

Click here to view the Cumberland County ballot.
Click here to view the Hunterdon County ballot.
Click here to view the Warren County ballot.

Daggett's ballot placement:

Atlantic:    column 7, row 2
Bergen:    column 3, row 1
Burlington:    column 6, row 2
Camden:    column 6, row 2
Cape May:    column 5, row 2
Cumberland:    column 6, row 1
Essex:        column 4, row 2
Gloucester:    column 3, row 1
Hudson:    column 3, row 2
Hunterdon:    row 10
Mercer:    column 6, row 1
Middlesex:    column 4, row 1
Monmouth:    column 6, row 1
Morris:    column 6, row 1
Ocean:        column 7, row 2
Passaic:    row 11
Salem:        row 5
Somerset:    column 7, row 1
Sussex:    row 6
Union:        column 4, row 2
Warren:    column 9, row 3