NJ’s top election official not worried about voter intimidation

New Jersey’s top election official told lawmakers Tuesday that he did not fear intimidation or other election interference from the Trump administration, though he warned voters’ fright over the possibility of federal encroachment could prove a real harm to voting in the state.

Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell, who is New Jersey’s secretary of state, told the Senate Budget Committee he worried the Trump administration’s attempts to exert federal control over elections whose conduct the U.S. Constitution largely leaves to states could weaken trust in the process.

“I’m very confident we’re going to have safe elections. I’m very confident people won’t be intimidated at the polls, but it’s perception,” Caldwell said, adding, “I really want to go out to make sure that people know that it is safe, know that they will not be intimidated, know that they can exercise their right to vote in a very comfortable way.”

Since regaining office, Trump has issued a series of executive orders aimed at curtailing voting as the Iran war and faltering economy drag his unpopularity to new depths.

Among those are orders directing the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver election mail to voters who do not appear on a federal registry, purporting to institute a voter ID requirement, and instructing the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission to freeze federal aid to states that don’t share private voter data with the federal government.

New Jersey and other states have challenged those orders, and courts have generally blocked them as executive overreaches.

The state received assurances from the White House during a call with other secretaries of state that the federal government would not seek to menace voters away from ballot boxes, Caldwell said.

“They assured us there would be no intimidation. They actually said that,” he told the budget panel. “I don’t believe everything they say, but we’re going on to make sure that everyone knows that it’s safe, that our process is there.”

The New Jersey Department of State, which oversees elections, is also making adjustments to prepare voters for new Postal Service rules that could see some disenfranchised at the mail carrier’s hands, said Assistant Secretary of State Lauren Zyriek Enriquez.

The Postal Service will stop automatically applying postmarks at post offices and will instead apply them at regional distribution centers. Election mail may not reach those centers for days after a voter sends it.

The change has spurred some worry that New Jersey voters who send their mail-in ballots back on time could be disenfranchised. In New Jersey, election officials are required to count valid mail-in ballots that reach them up to six days after polls close so long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

The department is reminding voters that they can return their mail ballots by depositing them in a secure drop box or hand delivering them to their county elections board in addition to sending them through the post.

“We have also enhanced some of the messaging regarding the changes with USPS,” Zyriek Enriquez said. “We have advised in the past, that our voters that if they are going to go to one of the USPS facilities, to go into the office and ask for that timestamp.”

Customers can request post office staff apply a postmark to their mail rather than wait and have one applied at a regional distribution center.

New Jersey officials counted 20,479 late-arriving mail-in ballots in last year’s general election, Caldwell said. The state tallied 671,763 mail votes in all for those races. Mail ballots accounted for just under 20% of the nearly 3.4 million votes cast in the 2025 general election.