Ravinder Singh Bhalla won the municipal election Tuesday for councilman-at-large of Hoboken, N.J., and if he also wins the run-off election on June 9, he would have the national distinction of holding the highest elected office as a Sikh.

Election rules require that a mayoral candidate and the slate of three council-at-large candidates win with more than 50 percent of the votes. But because of the large number of candidates, six for mayor and 12 for the council-at-large, no one candidate was able to collect that many votes. The top two mayoral winners and the top six council-at-large winners then compete in a run-off election.

Ravinder Singh is part of the slate for mayoral candidate Dawn Zimmer. She won with 36 percent of the 9,986 votes, according to the Hudson County clerk's office. Her closest competitor, Peter Cammarano, won 34 percent of the votes.

But after the absentee ballots were counted yesterday, Cammarano had taken the lead by 70 votes, Ravinder Singh said. Provisional ballots are expected to be counted by the end of the week, when the clerk will also certify the winner. But whatever the results, Zimmer and Cammarano will face off in next month's election.

Money was not a factor in this election. Out-funded by another mayoral candidate, Elizabeth Mason, who used her own finances to pack her campaign chest with about $500,000, the Zimmer campaign made it to run off with about $125,000, Ravinder Singh said. The Cammarano campaign also made it with about $150,000.

Ravinder Singh's Sikh identity also was not a factor in this election. He proved many of the other candidates and the political pundits wrong by winning the second largest number of votes, nearly 14 percent of the 25,988 votes cast. Fellow slate-candidate Carol Marsh surpassed him with only 21 more votes. And David Mello, also on the slate, had the third highest number of votes, at 12.7 percent.

A win for the mayoral candidate usually means a win for the entire slate, but not for Cammarano. Only one of his three slate-candidates won enough votes to be in the run-offs.

Zimmer and her two greatest challengers, Cammarano and Mason, were all council members who oversaw a very unpopular property tax increase last year. She and Ravinder Singh were hoping that voters were not angry with all elected officials, just ones that contributed to the tax increase. Solving the tax and budget crisis became the top campaign issue for Zimmer and Ravinder Singh.

The city council is the legislative body of city government, which also passes the annual budget. If Ravinder Singh wins again next month, he would hold one of the three at-large seats for a four-year term.

"I am cautiously optimistic," Ravinder Singh said yesterday. "Anything is possible."



Note: By Anju Kaur
Sikh News Network staff journalist
anjukaur@sikhnn.com
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