Incumbent Princeton Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller was the top vote-getter in the Democratic primary race for Princeton Council on Tuesday with 2,722 votes, according to the Mercer County Clerk’s office.
Tim Quinn, a former school board president, came in second place with 2,278 votes.
Two seats are open on the six-member council. Voters could choose two candidates.
Leticia Fraga, who was hoping to become the first Latina on the governing body, came in third place with 2,225 votes, just 53 votes behind Quinn. Anne Neumann, who ran a campaign focused on housing and affordability issues, came in fourth place with 1,406 votes. Neumann pushed the other candidates to focus more on housing and affordability.
Crumiller won 18 of 22 districts and came in second in the other 3 districts, and won the absentee voting. Quinn won 3 of 22 districts. Crumiller and Quinn tied in one district.
Many voters told Planet Princeton they bullet voted in the council race to try to help their favorite candidates win. There were 1,917 undervotes for council if one looks at the number of voters who participated in the Democratic primary and the votes cast for the council race.
Liz Lempert ran unopposed for mayor in the Democratic primary and received 4,200 votes. There were also 29 write-ins.
There were no Republican candidates in the GOP primary for Council. Peter Marks ran unopposed for mayor in the Republican primary and received 503 votes.
It is still not known whether a Republican received enough write-in ballots to field a candidate for the November general election. There were 21 write-ins. Petitions for independent candidates were due in the county clerk’s office this afternoon.
This story has been updated to include absentee ballots.
The statistic that Crumiller only received 32.5% of the vote gives the wrong impression of the amount of support she received. Since every voter could cast two votes, Crumiller received 32.5% of all votes cast, but if there were about 4000 Democratic voters (based on the mayoral vote), over 60% of them supported her. Quinn and Fraga also received the support of the majority of the voters, and Neumann was supported by about 33%.
We understand your point, but another issue to consider is that many people bullet voted and did not vote for two council candidates.
I agree, the important statistic is “on what percentage of ballots did each candidate earn a vote?” There were 5259 ballots (calculated by adding up the vote totals including absentee — 2711, 2273, 2215, 1402; also adding in the undervotes, 1917; then dividing by two). So the percentages are: Jenny Crumiller 52%, Tim Quinn 43%, Leticia Fraga 42%, Anne Neumann 27%.
Almost 20% of Democratic primary voters choose to not vote for Lempert. That’s very interesting.