Chapter 2 The supreme court then ordered a special election to be held in September 2000 in Chesilhurt for the offices of mayor and borough council. The cases in this section of the book illustrate how courts use three basic concepts of election dispute resolution—the will of the voter, ballot irregularities and altering the result of the election—to deal with the facts in the cases before the courts. Although these concepts are applied from case to case and from state to state, the outcomes of the cases are not wholly predictable. Sometimes, as in Gray-Sadler, a court will make a surprising set of inferences to reach a result even though the concepts would seem to require a different conclusion. Later on, in Chapter 5, we ask whether a court that stretches the law to remedy proven irregularities could make a decision based on subjective impressions. This is always a danger when a court uses its equity powers to right a wrong, but the legal system has built-in procedures for dealing with overreaching. When a lower court oversteps the bounds of its equity power, the corrective action comes in the appeal process. When a state supreme court seems to overstep those bounds, the corrective action comes in later decisions that overrule the precedent or restrict it to the particular facts of that case. Peter Murphy was the victim of the latter approach in In re Ocean County Com’r of Registration for a Recheck of the Voting Machines for the May 11, 2004, Municipal Elections, 879 A.2d 1174 (N.J. 2005), a New Jersey case that came after Gray-Sadler and also involved a write-in ballot that was not counted. Ocean County limits Gray-Sadler to its facts while applying the same principle—that irregularities must change the result of the election before an election will be nullified. At a May 11, 2004 election in the Township of Long Beach, New Jersey, there were six candidates on the ballot for three city council seats. Two of the candidates won outright, but there was a tie for the third seat between Ralph Bayard and Peter Murphy. That is, there was a tie in the votes cast by voters who marked the printed ballot. However, • there were three absentee ballots that had been postmarked before the May 11 election, but were rejected because they were not received until May 12, the day after the election; the absentee ballots had not been opened and it was not known for whom they were voted; • there were five write-in votes, four of which were cast for people whose names were not on the ballot, and one of which was cast for Mr. Murphy; the vote for Mr. Murphy was disallowed because his name was printed on the machine ballot; • there were seven provisional ballots (ballots that are cast by people whose qualifications were challenged at the polls); one was disallowed because the voter had moved out of town, and the remaining six were counted. When all of the ballots were tallied, Mr. Bayard won by one vote and was sworn into office. Mr. Murphy challenged all of the decisions about these ballots, and lost. On appeal, the New Jersey Supreme Court began by saying, A challenger has the burden of proving that one or more legal votes were rejected, and that the number of improperly rejected votes was sufficient to change the result of the election. The challenger is not required to prove that the rejected votes were cast for him or her. At 1178. 33