A candidate for Hillside Township Council is back on the ballot after her petitions were initially rejected by the municipal clerk, resolving a legal battle that was originally set to take months to resolve.
Sonya McBurrows, an ally of Hillside Mayor Dahlia Vertreese, filed to run for an at-large council seat with 278 signatures, 28 more than the 250 she needed. A complaint was filed by the local Democratic boss, however, and Hillside Municipal Clerk Rayna Harris determined that 37 of McBurrows’s signatures were invalid, thus removing her from the ballot.
McBurrows filed a legal challenge against her removal, and the case was assigned to Superior Court Judge John Deitch. Absurdly, Deitch then scheduled a hearing in the matter for October 3 – two weeks after vote-by-mail ballots have to be sent out. Deitch then moved the hearing forward three weeks to next Monday, September 15, before finally switching it to today.
McBurrows’s attorney, Jason Sena, argued in court today that McBurrows should remain on the ballot for two reasons. For one, he said, McBurrows was never notified of the challenge against her signatures as is required by state law, only learning of it once Harris had already made the decision to remove her from the ballot, a timeline Harris herself corroborated.
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse. It’s the law,” Sena said. “That is a significant due process violation.”
Secondly, Sena said that eleven of the contested signatures should in fact have been allowed to stand. Harris had already conceded that six of the eleven should be counted before the hearing began, and Sena called up testimony related to the remaining five.
In his ruling, Deitch said that while Harris’s failure to alert McBurrows of the challenge violated state law, it didn’t amount to an attack on her due process rights: “While I find that the statute wasn’t complied with, I don’t find that the noncompliance was willful or malicious or somehow designed to prejudice the candidate,” he said. But he also said Sena had successfully convinced the court of many contested signatures’ validity, thus putting McBurrows above the 250-signature threshold and keeping her on the ballot.
The challenge to McBurrows’s signatures was originally filed by Anthony Salters, the chairman of the Hillside Democratic municipal committee who recently served a prison sentence for tax fraud. The local Democratic committee is supporting Councilman Craig Epps for mayor and his rival slate of council candidates in the November 4 nonpartisan election.
McBurrows is running on the Building a Better Hillside ticket with Vetreese, who has been on the outs with local Democratic power brokers for years, and one incumbent at-large councilmember, Robert Rios. Vertreese, an ally of Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, was first elected in 2017 by just 28 votes, and won re-election in 2021 even after the Union County Democratic organization endorsed one of her rivals.
A third mayoral candidate, Councilwoman Andrea Hyatt, is also running with her own slate; her slate only includes two at-large council candidates, so that race is an eight-way contest for three seats.
