Two Harrison candidates followed the signature requirements they were told to follow — by two separate government offices. A judge just ruled that wasn't good enough, dismissing their ballot-access lawsuits anyway.

The numbers that didn't add up.

Mayoral candidate Dominick Ritorto and First Ward council candidate Michael Verile sued in Hudson County Superior Court after their petitions were challenged for having too few signatures. Under a 2025 state law, Ritorto needed 161 signatures and Verile needed 31 — but both the Hudson County Clerk's office and the Harrison Town Clerk's office had told them the minimums were just 25 and 10. Those figures were even lower than the thresholds for that year's primary election. Hudson County Assignment Judge David Katz dismissed both lawsuits on July 16, ruling the candidates were responsible for meeting the correct thresholds regardless — and that they'd also filed their court challenges three days late.

How the wrong numbers spread in the first place.

Hudson County's Supervisor of Elections, Ambar Vargas, provided the incorrect figures in a written email to local news site YourHarrison.com, which published them in a candidate guide ahead of the June 2 filing deadline. Both Ritorto and Verile read that guide before submitting their petitions — a fact both sides agreed on in court. When one candidate separately emailed the Harrison Town Clerk's office asking whether the rules were the same for primary and independent candidates, the office wrote back: "Yes - you are correct. You do need the petition for both," without ever flagging that the actual signature thresholds differed.

The county's defense: the real numbers were public all along.

Vargas wasn't called to testify, though in an earlier, separate case she said giving signature guidance isn't the clerk's office's job. The county's legal argument is that the correct 5% threshold was "objectively calculable" from public election results. But there's a wrinkle: the mayor's and councilman's attorneys submitted a 10-page excerpt of those results to support their case, while the version publicly posted on the Hudson County Clerk's website only runs 41 pages — and YourHarrison.com reported it couldn't confirm the full document was actually available online before the deadline.

A legal question still hanging in the air.

Judge Katz didn't weigh in on the bigger constitutional question: can flawed guidance from the government itself be used to disqualify candidates who relied on it in good faith? Attorney Michael Collins, representing Ritorto and Verile, pointed to a 2021 appellate case, Fuhrman v. Mailander, where judges ordered a petition onto the ballot after candidates relied on bad information from a municipal clerk — but Katz didn't follow that precedent here.

What's next.

No appeal has been confirmed as of July 21, though reports indicate the candidates are considering one.