West Windsor Democratic Committee president Rae Roeder staved off an attempt by longtime political foe and former councilman Franc Gambatese, who tried to oust her from her position in the June 3 primaries.##M:[more]##
Gambatese and seven other candidates launched write-in campaigns and were successful in being elected in five township districts in which no candidates had filed petitions. During the Democratic Committee’s reorganization meeting following the primary, Gambatese was nominated for the president position, but fell short, with a vote of 16-13. Alison Miller was re-elected as vice president, with 17 votes.
Other write-in campaigns had been launched in some of the township’s 16 districts, but candidates who had filed petitions in those district received the winning number of votes in those districts. In districts where no candidates had filed, the victories went to the write-in candidates.
In District 3, where no candidates filed, Franc Gambatese received 13 write-in votes, and Mary Ann McKiernan received 11 votes.
In District 12, Nicholas Schiera and Grace Yu garnered 16 and 15 votes, respectively, and in District 13, Kamal and Veena Khanna received 14 votes each. Both of those districts also saw no candidates file petitions. In District 14, Avinash Diwan won the male seat with 9 write-in votes, and in District 15, Eunice Wu won the female seat with 3 write-in votes.
Gambatese says that over the past few years, a lot of the seats went unfilled, and that he organized a group of Democrats for write-in campaigns for each district. He says that even though he didn’t receive enough votes for president, “it was really very positive.” He said he ran for a change in West Windsor.
He also says he and the newly elected members of the committee will be forming a new Democratic club in town to support Democratic candidates and Democratic platforms.
“At the county level, West Windsor never asserts itself into the project,” he says. “If you are a township that has more involvement with the county, maybe you’ll get your roads fixed faster, maybe you’ll get your bang for the buck. It’s really gone untapped.”
He says a lot of people have been calling for the revival of the Democrats in West Windsor because “they get upset when they see Democratic leadership supporting Republican leadership.”
Roeder, on the other hand, says she welcomes the new members who won in the primary because it means that there are now seats filled where there weren’t any before, and the work can be divided up among all the members. “We’re just glad that people wrote their names in,” she says. “All the people that we could find got elected again. We’re glad that they brought new people to the process. We want to move forward, and now there won’t be just a few of us doing the work.”
She also said that Gambatese cannot start another Democratic club in town because there already is one. She says that the committee members work very hard to elect county and state Democratic representatives and a Democratic president, and that she fails “to see the relationship with this to anything in West Windsor.”
“In West Windsor, the Democrats and Republicans have separate committees, but they don’t influence municipal elections because the party is not supposed to support a candidate because it’s nonpartisan,” Roeder said. “If you’re talking about a municipal election, they don’t run as Democrats and Republicans. That gives more people an opportunity to participate in the system. We choose candidates based on skill and ability as opposed to whether they were one party or another.”
She said that this allows people to combine their effort and ability and work in the community for the good of the community, and West Windsor residents voted for the current form of government. She says the Democratic committee does not endorse municipal candidates for that reason.
