As the United States watches Governor Chris Christie and US Senate Candidate Mayor Cory Booker in the next few weeks, as well as the antics of Tea Party candidate and one man sound-bite-generator, candidate and former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, I thought I would share a few pieces of wisdom learned during my turn as a NJ elected official.
1) Just One Person Can Make a Difference
With billions of people in the world, it is easy to feel that your one voice does not make a difference. That one voice alone can’t possibly matter when drowned out by all the others. But that is what the powers that be want you to think.
A few years ago I was encouraged that Howard Dean was running for President and I was inspired to get involved with the campaign. During a Howard Dean meetup in NJ, I met my State Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, for the first time. She told us that candidates are chosen in NJ by County Committee. If you want better candidates and more honest elected officials, you need to get involved in your County Committee. When the primary happens, she said, look on the ballot for your County Committee representatives – there should two from each voting district - one man and one woman. Here is where you vote for the Committee members who pick candidates. You can run for the seat yourself to get on the ballot, but if there is no name there, she said, write your own name in right in the voting booth. Some districts have no Committee people in that seat. County Party Chairmen (Bosses) in NJ bank on the fact that the average voter has no idea that there are two county committee people that represent them on both the Municipal and the County level for each party. Most voters in NJ don’t vote in their Primary – let alone for the County Committee. That is how the corrupt Party Bosses get their people in. But that is exactly where you can make a difference.
I tucked the Assemblywoman’s advice away and when I went to vote in my primary – lo and behold – I was living in a district with nobody on the ballot for County Committee. So I wrote not only my name in, but that of my boyfriend, who had come to vote with me. In an eerie foreshadowing on our way in to the polling place, he had picked up the American flag that had blown down in the wind in front of our polling place and righted it. As we walked home, he asked me what took me so long to vote. I explained how I had written us both in based on Assemblywoman Weinberg’s advice. He said if he had known he would have done it too, and hey, wouldn’t that be funny if we got elected based on my one vote?
The very next day we found out by letter from our town clerk that indeed we each had been elected to our County Committee – by one vote. Mine. The rest, as they say, is history.
Former Assemblywoman Weinberg is now Senate Majority Leader Weinberg because shortly after Eric and I joined the Committee and saw the Pay to Play corruption of the Bergen County Democratic Committee first-hand, we had the opportunity to vote for Loretta Weinberg, a reformer, when State Senator Byron Bear stepped down. The vote to replace Senator Baer was not open to the General public (which is often how party bosses get their minions into office - they bully the committee into selecting their pick when an opening occurs). Senate seats in NJ are where party bosses can exert additional power. If they help get a candidate in – that Senator now has Senatorial courtesy and can block any appointment in that district as a favor to the Party Boss– a key tool to exert political power over judges, commissions, etc. For the election to fill Byron Baer’s seat, only the roughly 240 members of the County Committee who resided in Baer’s District 37, to which my boyfriend and I now belonged, could vote. Senator Weinberg had to go to court to fight the County Boss just to get all the Committee votes counted. (The Former Chairman, Joe Ferriero is in the news this week for being indicted again– this time for racketeering. The charges allege that he had been running the County Committee like Tony Soprano.) During the special election, Weinberg’s opponent in the race was Former Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa, who has also since been indicted and convicted for other crimes. Ferriero’s supporters had been trying to stop Committee members who had openly endorsed Weinberg, by challenging their right to vote. There was even forgery involved to kick Weinberg’s supporters off the Committee before the election. Weinberg still won by one vote after a month-long court case that ultimately enabled all votes to be counted. Weinberg won her Senate seat by one vote. Let that sink in. One vote.
I am still proud that I was able to cast a vote for the honest Senator Weinberg. Later, Senator Weinberg shared the story with Howard Dean himself about how I had got elected with one vote on her advice and then helped her win her seat by one vote. When I met Howard Dean in person he gave me a high five.
And so now you know – even when you think it doesn’t matter – your one vote really does. After that I was asked to run for local Council, and I won – this time with over a thousand more votes in addition to mine.
2) They Can’t Put The Cat Back in the Bag
A Municipal Chairwoman of the County Committee always tells me “If you want to stop a strategy – expose the strategy”. When you see corruption going on around you - tell someone – tell everyone you can.
As a county committee person, I was privy to meetings that the press was not able to get into. I witnessed how primary elections were figured out ahead of time by the Party Boss who applied pressure or gave out jobs to make sure usually only one name is on the ballot and the County Committee folks have no choices except the ones made for them already. After I was elected to town Council, I started to blog about the corruption of the democratic process. I organized protests and rallied my fellow elected officials to stand with me and protest outside County Committee elections where the Party Boss attempted to change the election rules. Once I started to let folks peek under the tent, they could not close their eyes to what was going on. I started blogging because the local newspaper could not get the story out there and in the beginning, too many people were afraid to speak up. Soon, the story became the local paper’s favorite topic – especially after the indictments and the convictions started.
3) Strength in Numbers (They Can’t Come After All of Us)
In NJ, we all live with the Sopranos version of reality. There is always that fear that if you anger the wrong person you will get “whacked”. But if you are the only one who knows something, you are in more danger. If you tell everyone you know what is going on, and rally folks to your side, you are not as vulnerable. You now have a team. Although I angered the Party Boss, the fact that everyone I knew, knew what I knew, meant they could not just silence me - they now had to try to silence most of the progressives in NJ – who now knew what was happening thanks to more people speaking out. Isolating and silencing you is not only more difficult – it is pointless.
After I was able to tell other reform-minded folks of my story, they started running for their Municipal Committees and started winning their Committee seats and local government elections too. We began running reform slates of candidates against the corrupt ones. And we started winning. Soon the local newspaper took to calling us a “Merry Band of Reformers.” We were even able to help pass the bipartisan Party Democracy Act to make County Committees more democratic. Even when the Party Boss tried to throw us “off the line” by taking away our committee endorsements even though we were incumbents, he lost because we let everyone know what he was up to. Our Party Boss had tried to run the County Committee, which should be a democratic organization representing the people, as his own fiefdom, as alleged in the racketeering charges released this week. But by speaking up and standing together, we were able to stop him. He was finally indicted by Chris Christie and stepped down from his position before he was convicted. That conviction ultimately helped propel Christie into the Governor’s mansion, although it was the efforts of members of his own party that brought much of the corruption to light and led to a major change in how elections happen in NJ.
In a sweet ending, the Majority Leader herself now blogs to keep folks up to date on what she sees going on in Trenton. She knows the true value of each and every vote, participating in a two way conversation with an informed electorate – and having lots of honest friends.
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