The Battle for the Ballot in New Jersey

A scholarly literature has recently emerged to study, document, and measure the effects of New Jersey's unique ballot bracketing system, colloquially known as the "county line," which New Jersey's party insiders and political machines have long used to determine the outcomes of the state's primary elections.To date, this literature has examined how the county line works and what its empirical effects are, but it has thus far failed to explain exactly why the county line system violates the U.S. Constitution.This Article fills this gap.Part I explores how New Jersey election law works to create the county line before surveying the different ways in which scholars have recently attempted to measure the county line's empirical effects.Part II then proceeds to examine why the county line turns out to be so radically and vehemently repugnant to the Constitution.The Article looks at the recent litigation brought to challenge the county line-in the three cases of Conforti v.