The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges Then the supreme court rejected Mr. Murphy’s claim that the absentee ballots should have been accepted even though they were received after the deadline required by New Jersey law. …A clear purpose of strict adherence to the statutory cut-off for counting absentee ballots, as with other rules for accepting absentee ballots, is to deter fraud and maintain “the integrity of the elective process.” …The statute is clear on its face; its rationale is plain, and the means adopted to secure its purpose as [sic] reasonable. The fact that other methods, deadlines, or rules arguably could have been enacted to address the same concerns or to accomplish the same purpose is not a proper consideration for this court. At 1179-1180 (internal citations omitted). Another of Mr. Murphy’s arguments, that the late absentee ballots might actually have been delivered to the board of elections before the polls closed on May 11 and just sat on someone’s desk, was dismissed as unsupported speculation. More serious consideration was given to Mr. Murphy’s argument that the write-in ballot cast for him should have been counted for him and not rejected. A state statute said that no write-in ballot “shall be voted for any person for any office whose name appears on the machine as a nominated candidate for that office…any [write-in] ballot so voted shall not be counted.” At 1180. But Mr. Murphy argued that there was not a sufficient warning to voters on the ballot instructions that their vote would be rejected if they wrote in the name of a candidate whose name was on the ballot. This argument sounds very much like the arguments that won the day in Gray-Sadler, which had been decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court five years earlier, but it did not help Mr. Murphy. The supreme court first quoted the language set out above from Gray-Sadler that recognized that there was a constitutional right to vote a write-in ballot, and that the state election laws were designed to prevent disenfranchisement of qualified voters. Then the supreme court distinguished the situation of the write-in candidates in Gray-Sadler from Mr. Murphy’s position as a candidate on the ballot. The first significant difference is that the three challengers in [Gray-Sadler] were write-in candidates whose names did not appear on the printed ballot, and who had campaigned vigorously against the incumbents for mayor and for two council positions. …Because the write-in candidates’ names were not on the ballot in that case, there was no risk that counting a write-in vote would result in double-counting any one voter’s vote. And that is the precise risk implicitly addressed by [the state statute involved] and explicitly addressed by [a state law] which provides that the statutory requirements for “[e]very electronic voting system, consisting of a voting device in combination with automatic tabulating equipment,… shall [be designed to]…[p]revent the voter from voting for the same person more than once for the same office.” At 1182. 34