Mount Holly's first partisan election offers little choice

Voters who approved injecting politics into Mount Holly elections for the first time in decades will be handed ballots in November that are bereft of a clear choice.

Residents in the formerly nonpartisan township will be asked to pick two candidates to fill two open seats on the township council, but the list will have only two names. One is a Democrat and the other a Republican because of a series of seat shuffles.

Their running mates dropped out of the race last week, just after the deadline to replace them had passed. Unless a write-in candidate overcomes the odds, the two are expected to be seated on the five-member town council in January.

"It's very unfortunate the way it turned out," said Jules Thiessen, the Democratic candidate and a former longtime councilman.

He said a notice of resignation from his former running mate, Brian Grant, was placed by his door after it was too late to name another candidate. "There were personal, family matters that cropped up in the last couple of months," Thiessen said. "I don't know the details."

Grant called the matters "truly of a personal nature." He said he also resigned as chair of the planning board and as a school board member around the same time.

Betty Sykes, the sole Republican candidate on the ballot, could not be reached for comment. She was named as a replacement when Janet DiFolco and Patricia Cauley, who had been nominated by the party and who ran in the June primaries, stepped down.

In June, a political blog in Mount Holly called the two women "placeholder candidates" who would later be replaced by their party's committee. Neither returned calls for comment then or this week.

DiFolco, wife of Mayor Rich DiFolco, resigned in time for Sykes to replace her on the ballot, but Cauley resigned too late for another person to be named, according to the Burlington County Clerk's Office.

Grant said: "I guess it's unfortunately a coincidental circumstance" that each party wound up with a single candidate on the ballot. "Skeptics will be skeptical."

Rich DiFolco, a Republican who had proposed the change in government one year ago, did not respond to calls for comment.

At that time, he said nonpartisan elections are confusing to voters and attract too few voters. In nonpartisan towns, candidates run by name only and not under a party column.

According to the League of Municipalities, about 80 towns out of more than 560 towns in New Jersey had this form of government as of last year. Its purpose is to keep politics out of local government.

In an interview several ago, DiFolco had predicted the political races would give voters "more choices" and allow them to select the party of their leaning. He said that despite the partisan label, most voters knew candidates' political affiliation.

The township council voted, 3-2, last summer to put the question on the November 2013 ballot.