Nicole Gaudiano

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Alex Clark never aspired to become a sheriff.

But the 28-year-old lab manager entered the sheriff's race in Somerset County, N.J., not to get the job but to help his favorite presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, get a prominent spot on the state’s Democratic primary ballot.

“I’m not running a campaign, or raising any money or spending any money,” Clark said. “I don’t expect to win.”

In New Jersey, county clerks often determine ballot positions by randomly drawing county candidates’ names from a well-shaken wooden box. Sanders' campaign says those drawings can favor establishment and other candidates who are aligned — or “bracketed” — with the county candidates.

Had Sanders not assembled his own slate of affiliated county candidates, he could have ended up in New Jersey's version of "ballot Siberia," said state Assemblyman John Wisniewski, Sanders’ state chairman. That could have handed Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, a major advantage in last month's drawings.

In the end, Sanders got the prime ballot position in seven counties and will appear in the next column in most others.

His campaign's close scrutiny of New Jersey's quirky ballot process reflects Sanders' determination to win every delegate possible in the state’s June 7 primary. Although he has almost no chance to win the Democratic presidential nomination, his final haul of pledged delegates will determine his clout at the party's convention in July and his ability to shape its platform.

“You want to be part of the drawing so that at a minimum, if you don’t get (column) A you get B,” Wisniewski said. “If you’re not part of that, you can be literally anywhere on the ballot.”

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Premier positioning on a ballot as “big as a bathmat" is “a longtime New Jersey obsession,” said Ross Baker, a Rutgers University political science professor.

Bracketed county candidates, such as would-be freeholders, often are drawn first from each county clerk's box for the Column A position on that county's ballot. Other primary candidates up and down the ballot who are aligned with the winner of the drawing also will appear in that first — and most visible — ballot column. Candidates who aren't bracketed with county candidates, in some cases, are either drawn or chosen later.

Baker said party leaders can punish non-conformists by using the process to ensure their names appear “in the right-hand corner with the bond issues that nobody reads.” Baker said he himself ran — and lost — as a “name-only” freeholder candidate in the 1980s. He agreed to have his name on the ballot to help a state assemblyman who had run afoul of Middlesex County Democratic Party leaders.

“To gain a more favorable ballot position, he needed to run with a full slate of constitutional officers,” Baker said of the assemblyman. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be a freeholder.’ He said ‘All I want is your name.’ ”

County clerks have discretion to interpret ballot positioning rules, and candidates are sometimes in the dark on how the rules will be applied.

Last month, a state Superior Court judge rejected a lawsuit filed by Democratic congressional candidate Alex Law that called on the Camden County clerk to announce the procedure for determining ballot placement before the application deadline. Law, who is challenging Rep. Donald Norcross in the 1st District Democratic primary, wanted to know in advance if he should bracket with county candidates.

Law's attorney, Alan Schorr of Cherry Hill, N.J., said there's no basis for an appeal because the county drawing was fair. But the question remains: "How do you have something so important and not tell people in advance what the rules are?" Schorr said.

Sanders' campaign requested ballot placement rules from each of the state's 21 county clerks and received three responses. Only one response — from Sussex County — answered the question. To play it safe, the campaign recruited county candidates in most counties "because we couldn’t get a good answer," Wisniewski said.

Clark, the lab manager, said he was attending a meeting for Sanders campaign volunteers when someone asked if anyone from Somerset County was present.

“I was the only one,” he said.

Thus began Clark's journey to coffee shops and strip malls after work to collect the 100 signatures he needed to get on the ballot. He never imagined that supporting Sanders would put him in the sheriff's race.

“I didn’t really understand how the election laws worked and how the elections were run,” he said. “It’s not something that regular people who go to vote are aware of.”

Sanders has good reason to focus on New Jersey. The state has 126 pledged delegates at stake in the June 7 primary. Among the six states holding nominating contests that day, only California has more.

Sanders was the first 2016 presidential candidate — from either party — to court New Jersey voters in person, with rallies that drew thousands at Rutgers University on Sunday and in Atlantic City on Monday. But it won't be an easy fight. Clinton defeated then-senator Barack Obama by 10 points in the state's 2008 presidential primary, and she had a 28-point lead over Sanders in the most recent Monmouth University poll.

“It’s an important state. We’re going to try to win delegates there,” said Tad Devine, one of Sanders’ top strategists. “Whether or not we can win the state, I think that remains to be seen.”

Clinton supporter Vin Gopal, chairman of the Monmouth County Democratic Party, said the party should avoid alienating Sanders supporters because Clinton will need their votes in November. But Sanders’ decision to field county candidates is forcing the county party to contend with primaries when it hasn’t done so for many years. Gopal said he's concerned Sanders' backers will simply vote for all the candidates in his bracket.

“The Sanders campaign is kind of forcing county chairs to work against him because of that,” he said.

“Oh, please,” Wisniewski responded. The county name-only candidates aren’t campaigning and it would be “almost impossible” for them to win, he said.

But he also said he's filed legislation to change New Jersey’s “confusing and inconsistent” ballot formatting for future elections. Under his bill, the highest office on the ballot would determine where candidates' names appeared.

“The notion that you have to have freeholder candidates in order to have a chance to have favorable ballot position really seems to me to be a barrier to entry,” Wisniewski said. “Let everybody have an equal shot at a fair ballot position.”

Clark said that although he has no expectation of winning the sheriff's race, his friends will get a kick out of seeing his name on the ballot.

“It’s kind of fun,” he said. “I’m sure it’s something I’ll look back on with amusement.”

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