So just how much power do county political machines wield?

Well, the upcoming governor's race is going to give us one of the first real answers to that one by one, the candidates have been announcing they won't participate in the party conventions, which are typically an important part of the primary process.

It's where candidates compete for the endorsements of their organizations.

And the spot that previously earned them on the primary ballot.

But with the county line gone, this tradition may be going by the wayside, too.

It all comes as lawmakers introduce yet another new ballot design that critics say does nothing to make the system fairer.

Senior writer Colleen O'Dea is with me now to discuss.

Colleen, let me start with this latest news that it appears the Senate has now put forward a new version of the ballot design bill.

What's in it?

What can you tell us?

So the bill is pretty similar to the assembly bill, which was passed now a couple of months ago.

Everybody's been kind of waiting for the Senate to take some action.

There are some things that disturb advocates, though.

For instance, there's some language in there that would allow for county clerks to have some discretion in terms of how they show candidates who are associating.

And that would mean essentially this year we've got assembly candidates.

Right.

There are two assembly seats for every district.

So two candidates running.

One of the things that possibly could happen would be they would appear in the same box within a block.

So there would be no lines separating their two names, making it clearly look like they're associating together.

That would be something that would help kind of put a thumb on the scale, right, in terms of helping those candidates.

The second is this.

Point right, is that these ballots are not supposed to differentiate between an incumbent candidate and a newcomer.

But.

But go on.

Yeah.

In an ideal world, yes, they should be just very neutral and let people make decisions.

The second potentially problematic part here would require the use of a letter and a number for each candidate.

So there'd be a candidate one A, a candidate, one B candidate two A, And this is something that could kind of try then to mimic a line is and it's unclear from the legislation's language whether this could happen if all of the people, let's say, who are endorsed by a certain Democratic Party that Hunterdon County Democratic Party, if they all were on if they all got, let's say the letter A, then easily people would know, oh, okay, I need to vote for all the people if I want to vote for the endorsed candidates.

And that also is problematic.

It again, would be putting a thumb on the scale.

All right.

Let me switch back into this.

Talk about the party conventions.

Who's in, who's out, who's skipping from each side of the major party candidates?

So we heard this week that Jon Bramnick has said he will not participate in the convention process.

Edgar is not participating.

Bill Cepeda isn't participating mostly, although we had heard that he was going to be talking to the ocean County Republicans.

I think they had a screening process last night.

He, Speedy is expected to get a line in Ocean County.

On the Democratic side, you've got Steve Phillip, the Jersey City mayor, who said he won't participate.

So maybe it behooves them to appear against the party machine rather than with or I guess, calculating whether or not politically that means more.

So then, I mean, do the conventions matter?

So the conventions definitely still matter because there will still be a note of notice on the ballot that shows that you were endorsed by a certain parties, a certain county's party.

The other thing, though, is that a county endorsement brings with it a lot of grassroots legwork, a lot of potentially money.

You've got, you know, all of the county party bosses and the county committee people from across the county, then going out and telling folks, yeah, vote for so-and-so.

So there is still some some definite benefit to it.

Yeah.

And we should note there that we just saw Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, who's running, who did participate in a convention and did beat out Newark Mayor Ras Baraka in a runoff there.

All right, Colleen, a lot to follow in the next few months.

Colleen O'Dea for us, thanks so much.

Thanks a lot, Bree.