High court won't hear appeal

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court refused on Monday to be drawn into New Jersey's Senate dispute, allowing the Democrats to replace their candidate one month before the election.\nThe case resurrected memories of the court's intervention in the Bush-Gore presidential contest. But this time the justices stayed out and let the decision of a Democratic-dominated state supreme court stand.\nThe Democrats may now go ahead with plans to replace Sen. Robert Torricelli with former Sen. Frank Lautenberg on the Nov. 5 ballot in their effort to retain their one-seat hold on the Senate.\nNew Jersey Republicans had called the switch a political ploy intended to dump a candidate who seemed sure to lose in favor of a potential winner. They had asked the Supreme Court to stop the Democrats, arguing that the candidate swap came too close to Election Day.\nThe high court did not explain its reasons for rejecting the GOP appeal.\nWord from the high court came on the first day of the new Supreme Court term, and a week after Torricelli bowed out of his re-election race.\nTorricelli said he would step aside after polls showed him losing ground to Republican challenger Douglas Forrester who had made Torricelli's ethics problems the focus of his campaign.\n"Game on," Forrester campaign manager Bill Pascoe said after the Supreme Court announcement. "Now we've got the legalities out of the way. That means we've got a race on our hands."\nPolls released over the weekend showed Lautenberg with a slight lead, 49-45 and 46-40 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.\nAfter the Democrats chose Lautenberg as a replacement, the Republicans went to court.\nNew Jersey's highest court unanimously approved the candidate switch, a decision that Forrester's lawyers had said "opens the doors of American elections to considerable mischief."\nThe Republicans appealed to the high court last Thursday, arguing that the candidate swap was both illegal and unconstitutional. State law prevents such an 11th hour switch, and it could strip voting rights from absentee and overseas voters, the GOP argued.\nAbout 1,700 absentee and overseas military ballots have already been mailed with Torricelli's name on them.\nIf the state ruling stood, "political parties will be encouraged to withdraw losing candidates on the eve of election, replacing them with candidates who have not gone through the rigors of the nomination process in hopes of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat," Republicans argued to the justices in a court filing last Thursday.\nThere was plenty of time to reprint ballots, Democrats assured the Supreme Court in paperwork filed Friday.\n"It may be that Forrester believes he will be politically hurt by the New Jersey Supreme Court's judgment and is simply unwilling to say so," Democrats wrote.\nAs in the 2000 election fight, Republicans contested a ruling from a majority-Democrat state court.\nThe Supreme Court surprised both sides by jumping into the fight two years ago, ending ballot recounts in Florida by a bitter 5-4 vote. Democrat Al Gore had sought the recounts in hopes of erasing George W. Bush's tiny lead.\nNew Jersey Republicans are also pursuing a separate challenge in federal court in Trenton on behalf of two people the party contends could lose their votes.\nIn still another challenge, the National Republican Senatorial Committee said it planned to ask the Federal Election Commission to bar Torricelli from giving his campaign money to the party or to Lautenberg.