PoliticsNJ.com 9/15: Zisa Edges Weinberg; Uncounted Ballots Remain

As reported last night on the http://www.PoliticsNJ.com web site, Ken Zisa edged Teaneck's Loretta Weinberg in balloting by Bergen County Democratic Committee members to select a replacement for Byron Baer's Senate seat in the 37th District, both on an interim basis and on the November ballot. However, seven ballots remain uncounted, perhaps still in Rep. Steve Rothman's jacket pocket, and legal wrangling to open these ballots is sure to follow. It appears that the proxy war between Bergen County Democratic leader Joseph Ferriero and Gubernatorial candidate Jon Corzine will rage on.

Ferriero/Zisa defeat Corzine/Weinberg by one vote in Senate contest not necessarily over By STEVE KORNACKI PoliticsNJ.com

SEPTEMBER 15 - It was the 87 uncounted ballots stuffed into Box 13 in Duval County, Texas that allowed Lyndon Johnson to beat Coke Stevenson for a U.S. Senate seat in 1948.

Sixty-seven years later, seven sealed ballots tucked in Congressman Steve Rothman's coat pocket will determine if it's Ken Zisa or Loretta Weinberg who gets to go to the state Senate, and whether Jon Corzine prevails in a showdown with a Democratic Party boss.

Weinberg, whose candidacy Corzine championed, will need a court ruling to open the ballots, but if she gets one, it is very likely she will overcome a four-vote deficit and replace Byron Baer in the state Senate.

If they remained sealed, then Zisa, the choice of Bergen County's Democratic boss, Joe Ferriero, will become the senator and will run as the Democratic nominee in a special election this fall.

Zisa bested Weinberg at tonight's special election convention of 37th District Democratic county committee members. There were actually two questions on the ballot. By a 114-110 count, voters chose Zisa for the immediate appointment to the seat. And by a 112-111 margin, they picked Zisa to run as the party's candidate in November.

Voting took place between 5:30 and 8:00 at Bergen County Democratic headquarters in Hackensack. Rothman, at the request of both sides, chaired the convention and mobilized his staff to enforce a series of highly specific rules that lawyers for both campaigns spent most of the day hashing out.

Before the votes were tabulated, Rothman made the call not to count the seven disputed ballots, which are in plain white envelopes that have yet to be opened. No one knows for sure who voted for whom, but Weinberg's campaign lobbied for the ballots to be counted while Zisa's urged that they not be, so both sides clearly believe the seven ballots favor Weinberg.

Rothman threw them out because party rules give Democratic municipal committees 30 days to notify the county party when committeemen and women are replaced. It wasn't until Wednesday, though, that the Bergenfield and Tenafly Democratic committees submitted the names of the seven voters in question, even though those voters had joined the county committee in June.

"It would be a terrible precedent for the municipal committee to withhold the names of the voters until the day before the election," Rothman explained.

The seven voters, according to both sides, are all Democrats in good standing, some of them elected officials in their towns. The convention rules, which Weinberg and Zisa both signed off on, do not specify how to handle this exact situation.

In a related matter, Rothman did rule that five other county committee members from Bergenfield who, it was revealed on Wednesday, won their seats through fraud, were not eligible to vote. It took nearly two hours for the ballots to be counted by hand in a private room after the polls closed tonight. Weinberg and Zisa were allowed in the room, along with two representatives each. One of Weinberg's observers was Angelo Genova, her lawyer and one of the top election attorneys in the state. Ferriero and his organization's attorney, Dennis Oury, were also in the room.

When the counting and re-counting was completed, Rothman announced the results to the sixty or so Democrats who had been awaiting the verdict, and noted that the results may not be final.

"I felt that these seven ballots should not be counted," he said. "There was disagreement. Whether anybody wants to appeal based on these seven uncounted ballots, that's up to them."

Weinberg then spoke, all but announcing she would appeal. The assemblywoman called Zisa her "friend and maybe colleague" and congratulated him for winning "this portion of the battle."

As she spoke, some of her supporters wiped tears from their eyes. Nearly as many people held signs outside party headquarters as voted tonight.

"I'm still 70," Weinberg told the crowd. "I'm still a grandmother. And I'm still going to give the boys are hard time."

Zisa was conciliatory in his remarks, offering praise for Weinberg and playing off the theme of moving forward.

"She did what she had to do and I did what I had to do, and it all came out like it did," Zisa, who served in the Assembly with Weinberg for eight years, said as a beaming Ferriero looked on several feet away.

Afterwards, Weinberg said that she would consult with Genova before making a final decision. Which court she would need to appeal to is unclear.

Rothman, in the presence of Genova, scrawled his signature in big print over the seal of each envelope containing a disputed ballot. He then placed the ballots in the inside pocket of his blazer, where he said they will remain "until someone requests them in a legal proceeding.'

From the minute he stepped out of the room where the votes were counted, Ferriero made little effort to contain his glee. Zisa's promotion to the Senate has been on his agenda for years, but Corzine, in a surprise move, asked Ferriero last week to back Weinberg instead.

Ferriero, whose political machine needs loyal state senators in order to hum, refused, setting up the bizarre week-long battle that culminated with tonight's vote. Corzine didn't show up tonight, a decision that may lead to second-guessing given how close the margin was.

Initial signs are that Corzine will support Weinberg if she presses forward with a legal challenge, though he didn't issue a public statement saying so. A Weinberg loss is also a Corzine loss, since other party bosses might believe they can push him around and get away with it.

Corzine and Weinberg may have an ace-in-the-hole, at least in the short term. The state Senate must vote to seat winners of special election conventions. With Baer's resignation, Democrats have a 21-18 majority, with 21 votes needed to seat a new senator. And yet at least two Democratic state senators — Barbara Buono and Ellen Karcher — publicly backed Weinberg. If either one of them joined with Republicans, Zisa could be barred from taking his seat, at least until after the November election.

Steve Kornacki can be reached at mailto:steve.kornacki@gmail.com

Alan Sohn NEW: Now available in convenient blog format at http://TEANECK.blogspot.com See http://www.TeaneckInfo.com for the complete Teaneck Community Calendar. Send your event to mailto:Events@TeaneckInfo.com for inclusion on the site. "Scientia Est Potentia"