The A-Team slate of candidates in the Asbury Park election has hired Monmouth County Republican Chairman John Bennett as their attorney to challenge today’s election results.
Bennett told MMM’s Tommy DeSeno that he will be verifying what votes were not counted and why. He said he would also be looking at how many votes of the thrown out absentees may have voted provisionally and still need to be counted.
An A-Team campaign worker told DeSeno that the team believes they can pick up three of the five seats on the City Council. The didn’t win any seats in the unofficial count of machine and vote by mail (absentee) ballots.
The A-Team is comprised of former Councilman James Keady, former board of education member Redmond Palmer, Duanne Small, Nora Hyland and Daniel Harris. The top three A-Team candidates, Keady, Small and Harris, would need to pick up approximately 200 votes that have been rejected in order to over come the leads of the bottom three “unofficial” winners, Myra Campbell, Sue Henderson and John Loffredo.
Keady received 409 votes in the unofficial tally; Small 405 and Harris 388. Unofficial winners Loffredo received 640 votes, Henderson 608 and Campbell 598.
Four candidates of the 22 who ran, lost “unofficially” with more votes than the A-Team’s top three. Incumbent Kevin Sanders, a former mayor and former Republican of the Forward Asbury slate received 574 votes, Joe Woerner of the One Asbury slate received 566 votes, Talesha Crank of One Asbury received 441 votes, William Potter of the Forward Asbury slate received 431 votes, and Gregory Hopson received 428 votes.
The top “unofficial” winners, John Moor with 699 votes and Amy Quinn with 693, both of One Asbury, appear to be safe in what appears to be an inevitable recounted elected.
UPDATE 11:42 PM AsburyParkSun reports that A-Team candidate Jim Keady claims that 332 mail-in ballots have not been counted. Keady said 80 of the ballots were discarded because they were not filled in properly.
John Moor, Amy Quinn, John Loffredo, Sue Henderson and Myra Campbell are the top five vote getters of the 22 candidates for Asbury Park’s City Council, according to the Monmouth County Clerk’s website.
The results include vote by mail ballots according to Debbie who answered the phone at the Board of Elections. Debbie would not give her last name.
Moor, Quinn and Campbell ran together on the One Asbury slate. Incumbents Loffredo and Henderson ran on the Forward Asbury slate in the non-partisan election.
One hour after the polls closed in today’s municipal elections, Asbury Park has no results posted on the Monmouth County Clerk’s website.
In Jersey City, with 43% if the voting districts reporting as of 8:54 PM, Councilman Steve Fulop is on pace to defeat incumbent mayor Jerry Healy by a comfortable 54% to 37% margin.
UPDATE 9:10 pm Fulop declared victory on facebook at 9 pm. With 66% of the districts reporting, Fulop has 53% of the vote, Healy has 38%.
Congressman Frank Pallone fired the first salvo of the 2014 Democratic U.S. Senate primary with a “scathing letter” sent to Newark Mayor Cory Booker complaining that the city of Newark is not fulfilling its obligations to the Hyacinth AIDS Foundation, a New Brunswick based non-profit that services patients with HIV/AIDS, according to a report in The Star Ledger.
The Star Ledger received a copy of the letter dated on Friday, May 10, before Booker received the original.
Booker’s staff dismissed the letter they haven’t seen yet, telling the Ledger that Hyacinth’s funding is working its way through the Newark bureaucracy and will be paid out this year earlier than it was last year.
That circle around the sun this afternoon was a 22 degree halo, “a pretty common occurrence in the winter,” a meteorologist at the National Weather Service told MMM.
The phenomenon is caused by cold air above cirrus clouds, which the meteorologist said is happening today. The cold air creates hexagonal ice crystals. The sun’s light reflects off the crystals, causing the effect many of us witnessed, uncommonly, today.
Last week we learned that the Obama Administrations IRS has been targeting Conservative groups with the words ‘Tea Party’ and ‘Patriot’ in their names.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.
In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
Governor Christie’s office released parts of his interview with NBC’s Rock Center that did not make it to the Friday night broadcast.
Christie will be accompanying Prince Harry to the Jersey Shore this week. If there is a Prince Albert in Christie’s future, it will probably be a better kept secret than his lap band surgery.
Legislation that would eliminate the scheduled 10% surcharge on employers’ unemployment insurance tax was cleared by the Assembly Labor Committee today.
The bill, A-4112/A-3675, sponsored by Assemblywomen Amy Handlin (R-13, Monmouth) and Alison Little McHose (R-24, Hunterdon, Morris, Warren and Sussex), postpones the implementation of the surcharge, which is currently scheduled to go into effect on July 1, for one year. An identical bill, S-2404, passed the State Senate unanimously in February.
The Office of Legislative Services estimates that eliminating the surcharge will save employers $300 million in the coming fiscal year.
“The timing of this legislation is critical as we approach the summer season and with the effort to restore the Jersey Shore well underway,” stated Handlin. “Rebuilding communities involves both residential and commercial redevelopment. Companies who invest in our economy would face significant unemployment insurance increases which could impact their hiring decisions. This legislation ensures that the strides made in putting people back to work will not be affected by the cost increases that would have been felt under this surcharge.”
State Senator Barbara Buono, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, continues to lag terribly in name recognition in various independent polls that show her losing the November general election to Governor Chris Christie by over thirty points.
Worse for ‘Dawn Quixote’ Buono, as she was dubbed by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, she can’t raise the money needed to increase her name ID and message. Numerous media reports indicate that Buono will likely be the first major party nominee not to qualify for the maximum in New Jersey’s state matching fund program for gubernatorial candidates.
Christie, who has opted out of the state matching fund program for the primary, is spending $850,000 of the $6+million he has raised to boost Buono’s name ID and define her by her record of voting to raise taxes 154 times and as former Governor Jon Corzine’s budget chair.
