A long-running investigation into election fraud involving a State Senator from an Essex County district has now directly touched the election system itself, with the superintendent of elections now being charged with paying workers for time actually spent on political campaigns. This investigation has already resulted in an indictment against the Essex County freeholder who is married to the senator in question, as well as multiple charges of ballot-box stuffing brought against several of the senator's campaign workers.

Carmine Casciano, Superintendent of Elections for Essex County, was charged on Friday with official misconduct in the scheme, this after then-incumbent Essex County prosecutor (and presumed future New Jersey Attorney General) Paula Dow (D) had given him credit for alerting New Jersey authorities to possible voter fraud in the election of Senator Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex-29). According to the complaint against him, as described by The Star-Ledger (Newark), Casciano asked one or more county employees to keep written logs of all personal unpaid vacation days that they used for political campaign, and send him those logs, so that he would make sure that they would be paid anyway, in violation of the law. This activity occurred over a period of three years (2005-2008), after which he attempted to have the records altered or destroyed.

The scheme was discovered after the AG issued subpoenas on December 8, 2009, for the records of 20 or more Essex County election workers, documenting their paid vacations, sick time, and other days off. Those subpoenas came as part of the investigation into the Ruiz affair.

Today (January 11), Casciano was back at his job as Superintendent of Elections, because the law provides for automatic dismissal from a government job only on conviction of a crime, not mere indictment. Governor-elect Chris Christie (R) has already said that Casciano ought to resign immediately, and County Executive Joseph N. DiVincenzo has already said that he would ask Casciano to relinquish his unpaid membership in the Essex County Utilities Authority.

The scandal began with the Election of 2007, in which Ruiz won a hotly contested race in which two of her fellow Democrats (William D. Payne and Luis Quintana) ran as independents after losing the Democratic primary. Ruiz won that election with 57.6 percent of the vote, and the actual outcome of that election has never been contested.

However, irregularities with that election surfaced almost at once. Shortly after the election was held, Casciano noticed that at least two voters had voted twice, once by absentee ballot and again in person. The double voting was discovered by comparison of signatures between the absentee ballots on one hand, and "voting authority" stubs (the slips of paper that every voter signs before being given a ticket, or "voting authority," to hand to a voting-machine attendant) on the other.

Later, three absentee ballots that came from the same family were accidentally mailed back to the voters who had cast them. The voters opened the ballots and discovered that someone had unsealed their ballots and changed their votes to votes for Ruiz rather than for her opponent(s).

In March of 2009, the first of ten defendants was accused of altering those ballots and indicted. Last summer, the AG seized a computer holding registration data from Casciano's office. The indictments continued, involving four more of Ruiz' campaign workers and a data-processing technician on Casciano's staff.

Then in December of 2009 the investigation netted its biggest fish: Freeholder Samuel Gonzalez, who is married to Ruiz, and four more persons, including aides to prominent Democratic machine figure Steve Adubato and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. They were accused of illegally soliciting "messenger" ballots from voters not qualified to receive them, having themselves designated as the messengers, and then marking those ballots for Ruiz and thus casting ballots for voters who never had an opportunity to vote on their own. (Gonzalez has refused to resign his freeholdership, and his friends appear to be circling the wagons around him.)

In connection with these latest charges, the AG asked for the subpoenas of the day-off records. That's when they discovered evidence that Casciano might have been running a scam of his own, involving paying workers improperly. This alleged scam does not appear--yet--to be related to the Ruiz case.

Ruiz herself has never been accused of wrongdoing in the tainted election.

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