2005 NJ Governor race: Egg Harbor City, Egg Harbor township, and Estell Manor City

Now let’s take a look at the 2005 Governor’s race. Here are the official results:

Table 2: 2005 NJ Governor’s race, official results

year	municipality	office	Democratic	Republican	Third Party
2005	Egg Harbor City	Governor	4202	409	309
2005	Egg Harbor township	Governor	532	382	40
2005	Estell Manor	Governor	291	4187	78

Clearly, these results cannot be correct. The Republican vote in Estell Manor, for example, exceeds the population by a factor of more than 2.

My suspicion is that the results are shuffled, and the correct results should look like this:

Table 3: 2005 NJ Governor’s race, possible corrections

year	municipality	Democratic	Republican	Third Party
2005	Egg Harbor City	532	409	78
2005	Egg Harbor township	4202	4187	309
2005	Estell Manor	291	382	40

The corrected third party vote for the two smaller towns is a bit of guesswork. The third party vote in Egg Harbor City usually runs ahead of the third party vote in the smaller Estell Manor, so this guess is reasonable. On the other hand, I have lumped together all third party candidates, under the assumption that they were swapped as a group, which is far from certain.

2006 US Senate Race: Egg Harbor City and Egg Harbor township

Now let’s turn to the 2006 Senate rate. Here are the official results:

Table 4: 2006 US Senate race, official results

year	municipality	office	Democratic	Republican	Third Party
2006	Egg Harbor City	Senate	4385	4938	230
2006	Egg Harbor township	Senate	609	531	34
2006	Estell Manor	Senate	305	371	20

In this case, the Estell Manor results seem very plausible, while the results from Egg Harbor City and Egg Harbor township seem to have swapped.

I suspect the correct results should look like this:

Table 5: 2006 US Senate race, possible corrections

year	municipality	office	Democratic	Republican	Third Party
2006	Egg Harbor City	Senate	609	531	34
2006	Egg Harbor township	Senate	4385	4938	230
2006	Estell Manor	Senate	305	371	20

Evidently, these three towns are difficult to keep straight! One might wonder if this is the only time the results have been scrambled. Fortunately, 2005 (Governor) and 2006 (Senate) seem to be the only election years between 2004 and 2021 which stand out as having a clear mistake:

Initial results

New Jersey released the official results for Mercer County twice. Here is how the results were initially released:

Table 6: 2013 Governor race, initial official results (later revised)

year	municipality	office	Democratic	Republican	Third Party
2013	Robbinsville	Governor	9179	2102	136
2013	Trenton	Governor	1228	3035	77

The Democratic vote stands out as clearly incorrect – Trenton is large and Democratic, while Robbinsville is small and Republican. But the Republican and Third party votes are also out of character.

Revised results

In the revised (and current) official results, the Democratic votes for Trenton and Robbinsville are swapped:

Table 7: 2013 Governor race, official results (revised)

year	municipality	office	Democratic	Republican	Third Party
2013	Robbinsville	Governor	1228	2102	136
2013	Trenton	Governor	9179	3035	77

This is more plausible, but leaves the at least somewhat out-of-character Republican and third-party vote in place.

Proposed changes

I suspect that in the initial results, all of the vote counts – not just the Democratic ones – in Robbinsville and Trenton were transposed. Here are my suggested fixes:

Table 8: 2013 Governor race, possible corrections

year	municipality	office	Democratic	Republican	Third Party
2013	Robbinsville	Governor	1228	3035	77
2013	Trenton	Governor	9179	2102	136

If you make this change, the 2013 vote for both towns is more in character for with previous and subsequent elections:

Robbinsville township name change

In the case of Robbinsville and Trenton, there is a fairly plausible mechanism for how the the votes could have been transposed: Between the 2009 and 2013 NJ Governor elections, the township changed its official name from Washington to Robbinsville, and as a result, Trenton and Washington/Robbinsville switched positions in a alphabetic listing of Mercer County towns.

If you think that is too trivial a consideration to affect a the official tally of the NJ Governor’s election, I would like to direct your attention to the PDFs of the official results.

Here is how that list appears in 2009. Notice that the list is alphabetized, with “Washington Twp.” appearing just after “Trenton City”. All townships have the “Twp.” suffix.

And now the same list in 2013. You would expect to see “Robbinsville Twp.” just before “Trenton City”. Instead, “Twp.” is prepended to “Robbinsville”, allowing the township to appear in the same position in the list, just after Trenton.

Lucky thing it wasn’t a borough.

Anyway, I have sympathy. Dealing with heterogeneous data sets from multiple sources is hard.