The calendar may have just turned to March, but like the 2016 presidential election, talk is warming up ahead of time.
Council member Peter Mendonez, who just finished his first year on Council, has announced he will seek the Republican nomination for the District 15 Assembly seat recently vacated by Bonnie Watson Coleman.
Mercer County Democratic chair Elizabeth Muoio was selected in January to serve out the remaining year of Coleman’s term, and the seat will be up for election this fall. The 15th district represents residents from West Windsor, Trenton, Ewing, Lawrence, Pennington, and Hopewell in Mercer County as well as several towns in Hunterdon County.
His website, www.westillhaveadream.com, references Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Issues highlighted on the website include infrastructure, job creation, low taxes, and government transparency. Born in the mid-1980s, Mendonez writes it is time for the millennial generation to represent: “Our career politicians say they support our generation but do not nominate us to lead into the future.”
As a “clean energy entrepreneur” and an engineer by training, Mendonez highlights his quantitative and analytic skills and the application of his experience at IBM and PSE&G in his duties as a West Windsor Council member.
Meanwhile three Council seats are up for election as the terms for George Borek, Kristina Samonte, and Council president Bryan Maher will expire at the end of this year. Samonte confirmed to the News that she is not planning to run for re-election, though she declined to comment further at this time.
When asked of their plans, both Borek and Maher indicated it was too early to be talking about the fall elections.
#b#Mercer County Implements Remote Tallying.#/b# In West Windsor’s often contentious local elections, the eagerly anticipated results may be more speedily delivered in this year’s elections. A new remote tally system implemented by the Mercer County Clerk’s office is expected to reduce the time it takes to process voting results, which will be made available on the county website. A new reporting system will also show each candidate’s voting numbers by town district.
In the past the 16 West Windsor voting districts would send the voting machine’s electronic cartridges to the municipal clerk’s office after polls closed. A county designee would then collect all the cartridges and drive back to the County Clerk’s office in Trenton to read the voting information in the cartridges. The trip back to Trenton will be eliminated under the remote tally system, as the municipal clerk’s office will process the electronic cartridges in town on election night and then transmit them electronically to the County Clerk’s office.
“We are going to have the new system in place by the June primaries,” township clerk Sharon Young says. “This will speed up results. By the time I am done keying them in, it will be available on the county website.”
According to County Clerk Paula Sollami-Covello, municipal clerks will read the electronic cartridges using laptops designated for vote tallying. The results will be transmitted to the county central server through a secure VPN line and not via the Internet, which is against state law. Sollami-Covello adds that each electronic cartridge has a serial number, and the County Clerk’s office will still collect cartridges for verification.
The remote tally system is from Dominion Voting Systems, the company that also provides the voting machines and readers, according to Sollami-Covello. The election night online reporting system is from SOE Software.
Mercer County ran pilot programs in several municipalities last year, while Ocean and Monmouth counties already have remote tally systems in place.
