Something's Rotten in Flemington

Black Apple flips election after Election Day

An ATNJ-backed black apple candidate running for Hunterdon Central, Sandra Gong, has been officially declared the winner of the election.

She won by just 31 votes.

Following Election Day, she had actually been down by 48 votes:

It is certainly possible that Gong received the nearly 70% of the remaining mail in and provisional ballots that would have been required to bridge the gap between Election Day and the final results. However, there is another element to this story which should concern voters.

This story has more to it, because leading up to the election, it was discovered that Ms. Gong’s social media page was being run by a woman named Marianne Rampulla who sits on the Board of Elections in Hunterdon County.

Local residents made this discovery after taking a closer look at the page following an alarming response from the candidate.

Ms. Rampulla is a Democrat who hosts local club meetings at her home and has previously run for local town council at least twice, unsuccessfully.

This scandalous revelation in the community prompted Ms. Rampulla to recuse herself from reviewing ballots from Raritan Township from November 1 on, according to Board of Election meeting minutes.

The problem is, before this information was brought to light, was there any other influence that she could have had on the election? It appears there were two reviews of the mail in ballots prior to her recusal.

There is an old saying:

It isn't who votes that counts; it's who counts the votes.

To be clear, NJ Project is not necessarily suggesting anything wrong took place. But in an election as close as this, even the *perception* of impropriety is damning.

This is why the very aspect of recusal exists. The fact is, Ms. Rampulla recused herself late, choosing to remain active in the counting process for an election that she herself was running a campaign for. She did *eventually* recuse herself, so she knew she should have.

Even if she did not impact any counts, her knowledge of the counts to that point could have impacted strategy: for example, she could know how many more mail-ins they would need returned.

Questions of course now hang over this extremely tight race: why did she not recuse herself sooner? Would she have recused at all if knowledge of her close involvement in the campaign had not become a topic of conversation?

Perhaps none of these questions matter - but unfortunately, when you have a race that can be decided by a single vote, the very fact that they need to be asked calls the entire process into question.

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