Via the AP: No Special Election for N.J. House Seat

Corzine, who named fellow Democrat Menendez to fill the final year of his Senate term after Corzine became governor this month, said a special election would be too costly. He also said voters in Menendez’s district would be asked to go to the polls five different times over just eight weeks.

Ok, elections are expensive, but this really strikes me as unfortunate, as the Governor of New Jersey is denying a substantial number of citizens in his state adequate representation for a whole year because he decided to elevate the individual who held the seat.

Not only is that one less vote for the interests of the state, what about constituent services for that district this year?

If Corzine felt that a special election for the seat was too expensive, he should have picked someone else to fill the Senate vacancy created by his move to the governorship.

And this is rather odd:

The law does not allow the governor to appoint a replacement for a House seat, Assembly Democratic spokesman Joe Donnelly said.

Corzine said he would work with state lawmakers “to solve this problem for the future.”

It’s odd, because it isn’t the domain of the state legislatures to “solve” this “problem” as the issue of House vacancies are dealt with in Article I of the Constitution:

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

While it seems that there is some latitude on the calling of special elections, I am unaware of the idea that governors can simply unilaterally decide not to fill a seat–especially when we are talking about roughly half of a term.