Courier Post Editorial: Let winner take her Assembly seat

January 18, 2012

Gabriela Mosquera did not live in the 4th Legislative District for a full year before running for a state Assembly seat. The state constitution says clearly that Assembly candidates must live in the district where they’re running for at least a year prior to Election Day to qualify. But a decade ago, a federal judge in Newark declared the one-year residency rule unconstitutional based on the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That judge ordered the state not to enforce the one-year-in-the-district residency rule on Assembly candidates. His logic was that because district lines shift every 10 years, sometimes cutting right through the middle of cities and towns, candidates who have lived in a community for a long time can suddenly be shut out of races even though they’re not drop-in candidates. So, based on that ruling and order from U.S. District Court Judge Dickinson Debevoise, the state did not enforce the rule that Assembly candidates must live in a district for at least one year before running for election. And, in fact, the form that Mosquera signed to certify her candidacy with the state Division of Elections says in bold letters under “candidate qualifications” only that a candidate for the Assembly must: “be 21 years old by the day he/she is sworn into office, be a citizen and resident of the state of the state for two years by the day of election (and) be a legal voter by the day the petition is filed.” State elections officials approved her candidacy as legal both for the primary last year and the general election. Now, debate over the residency rule is renewed and Mosquera has been barred from taking office, which she won in November, because one of her Republican opponents in the race challenged her candidacy. A Superior Court judge ruled that Mosquera shouldn’t have been on the ballot because of the state constitution’s residency rules. The state Supreme Court is taking up the matter, with oral arguments slated for Jan. 27. A resolution is needed. We don’t think that altogether getting rid of rules that require candidates to live in the state or the jurisdiction where they’re seeking office is a good idea, or something most New Jerseyans would support. Does anyone really want carpet-bagging politicos moving all over the state and dropping into places they don’t know just to run for office? Without any residency rules, that would happen. Both parties would occasionally (or often) try to take advantage of that. Here, with all of the people the local Democrats could have picked to run for Assembly in the 4th District — local mayors or council members, business leaders, etc. who’ve lived in this region for decades — certainly they could have found a candidate who wasn’t a relative newcomer, as Mosquera is, having only lived in South Jersey for a few years and in the district since December 2010. Nonetheless, the Democrats picked her to run under an established system in which political parties knew the requirement for Assembly candidates to live in the district for at least a year was on the shelf by court order. If the state high court now decides the residency rule is constitutional and should be enforced, there’d be wisdom in that. Other federal courts have ruled that guidelines in other states about how long candidates must live in a jurisdiction to run for office are constitutional. In the meantime, as the residency rule was clearly not being enforced in 2011, as state elections officials certified her candidacy last year, and as she subsequently won election by a healthy margin, the proper thing to do would be to let her take office. It would be wrong for the court to ignore the will of the voters here by changing the rules of the game after Election Day, even if they weren’t the wisest rules.