Camden County Travesty: Activist Khan Targets Primary Ballot
New Jersey machine Democrats like to get angry about what happens around election time in the Southern United States, but what about Camden?
The Camden County Ballot would make even the Georgia GOP blush.
Here’s what it looks like:
The Camden County Democratic Committee choice for mayor, Victor Carstarphen, occupies a Column 1 position under Governor Phil Murphy and the other establishment-backed candidates.
The three alternatives – School Board Member Elton Custis, Camden Councilwoman Felisha Reyes Morton, and Spanish teacher Luis Quinones – reside in crammed-together obscurity in Column 5.
To look at them on the ballot, aligned the same way the Democratic Committee positions its candidates of choice, you would think they are running together on a ticket.
Georgia on my mind?
What about New Jersey, where spread sheets supplant white sheets.
The ballot is a travesty, undertaken by an organization whose government arm distributed $11.5 billion in tax incentives to corporate developers to build a helicopter pad and other 2 percent amenities on the waterfront in a 41.4% African American city where its only full-service supermarket is set to close, with a 36.4% poverty rate, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 data.
Custis earlier this month addressed the machine’s routine voter suppression tactics.
“I remember back in 2009 when I ran [for mayor of Camden] against the machine my little brother went in to vote my name and it lit up, most certainly, the name of the Honorable Dana Redd. No matter who we turned to, there was no way they were going to fix the problem. Yes, we have seen it. They [Camden County] control everything here in the City of Camden,” the mayoral candidate told InsiderNJ. “People need to be given the information, about poll workers for example. As it is, they keep it in a small circle, the resources, but it is the people the people who will make this whole city work.”
But if the county controls the instrumentation of voting, how can he hope to get a fair election?
“This time we’re going to have people out,” said Custis.
This week, Reyes Mortin tweeted a picture of the ballot and noted, “Voter suppression isn’t only done by southern Republicans.”
Also, Pastor Amir Khan, who ran for mayor in 2017 and this year backs Custis and the Custis slate, denounced the County Clerk’s ballot construction in a MUST WATCH video.
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