Exit surveys banned within 100 feet of NJ polling places

State election law bars all ‘expressive activity’ within the area near a polling place, but exit pollsters were granted an exemption in 1988 after the attorney general decided that the news media possessed a First Amendment right to conduct exit polling in that zone.

In 2007 that exemption was widened to include exit polling by non-partisan entities, but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sought clarification of whether voting-rights cards could also be distributed within the buffer zone – to which the attorney general replied that they could not.

The ACLU took the matter to appeal, the attorney general’s decision was upheld. The organisation then sought a review by the supreme court.

In its decision this week, the court found that the attorney general “did not have a constitutionally sound basis to breach the election laws by allowing exit polling”.

“The ACLU… contend that if exit polling is permitted, so must the dissemination of voting-rights materials,” wrote Justice Barry Albin on behalf of the court. “The inexorable logic of the argument… leads to the substitution of the 100-foot zone for a no man’s land of pollsters, protesters and peddlers on Election Day.

Justice Albin concluded: “The simple solution is that our election laws, which are content-neutral, non-discriminatory, and, as we have declared, constitutional, must be enforced as they were written, barring all expressive activity within the area near a polling place. Therefore, exit polling, the dissemination of voting-rights materials and other expressive activities are forbidden in the 100-foot zone.”

Media companies may seek to challenge the New Jersey ban, however. Ahead of the presidential elections in November last year a group of news organisations successfully overturned similar exit polling restrictions in a number of states including Minnesota and South Dakota.