New Jersey 2020 Election Results

New Jersey held no regularly scheduled state elections in 2020, but voters decided 3 statewide ballot measures.

Highlights

• Voters approved all 3 constitutional amendments, including recreational marijuana for adults and a two-year delay in redrawing legislative districts that extended a map that favors Democrats.
• Public Question 1 legalized marijuana for adult use, which Gov. Phil Murphy (D) called a huge step forward for racial and social justice. The vote itself did not open a market: the state still had to set up a regulatory system for how marijuana would be sold and taxed. Murphy signed the legalization bills in February 2021.
• Public Question 3 let New Jersey postpone legislative redistricting if census data arrived after February 15, a response to pandemic delays in the 2020 count. Republicans called it a power grab by the majority Democrats, and some progressive activists argued it would dilute for two more years the votes of growing minority communities. The data did arrive late, in August 2021, so that year's legislative elections ran on the old lines, and the map adopted in February 2022 was first used in 2023.
• Public Question 2 extended the state's $250 veterans' property-tax deduction to all honorably discharged veterans, not just those who served in wartime, and the full exemption to disabled peacetime veterans. Legislative analysts estimated about 50,000 veterans would qualify for the deduction and about 4,000 for the exemption.

Ballot measures