Layton v. Lewis, 2011 WL 1632039 (App. Div. May 2, 2011). Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis filed papers to run for the New Jersey State Senate in the Democratic party primary. Two registered Republicans objected to his nominating petitions, asserting that Lewis did not comply with the four-year residency requirement to run for Senate. An Administrative Law Judge rejected the Republicans’ objection. On review of that decision, the Secretary of State, Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno, reversed the Administrative Law Judge and found that Lewis had not met the residency requirement. Lewis filed an emergent appeal to the Appellate Division. In a per curiam opinion, Judges Carchman, Graves and Messano affirmed the Secretary of State’s decision.
The panel’s decision was essentially dictated by the standard of review. As the panel observed, “a strong presumption of reasonableness attaches to an agency decision,” and where an agency makes reasonable choices in accepting, rejecting or interpreting evidence, those choices are “conclusive on appeal.” And, though election laws “must be liberally construed to effectuate the overriding public policy in favor of public participation in the election process,” the right to run for office “is not unlimited, as the State may establish qualifications for ballot access to assure the integrity of the electoral process.”
Here, there was substantial evidence that Lewis had been a resident of California until very recently, and had therefore not satisfied the New Jersey residency requirement, which the panel essentially equated with “domicile.” Among many other things cited by the panel, which quoted the Secretary of State’s summary of the evidence at length, Lewis had voted in California as recently as 2009 and had paid taxes in California in 2008. He owned homes and a business in California. Though he got a New Jersey drivers’ license in 2006 and renewed it thereafter, he did not register to vote in New Jersey until the day he filed his nominating petitions. “[C]onsidering the totality of all of the evidence presented as to domicile and our limited review function, we conclude that the Secretary’s decision was supported by adequate evidence in the record that [Lewis] was not domiciled in New Jersey for the past four years.”
Lewis also argued that the Republican objectors had no standing to assert their challenge, which related to a primary election in which they could not vote. The panel rebuffed that argument, noting that allowing objections regardless of the identity of the objector “serves the fundamental electoral goal of assuring only qualified candidates are on the ballot and is in furtherance of protecting the integrity of elections.”
Finally, Lewis challenged the constitutionality of the residency requirement. The panel observed, however, that this same challenge had failed in a federal court suit that Lewis had brought. For that reason, the panel declined to consider this issue.