Choi slate sweeps Democratic primary Decisive victory ousts four incumbent council members BY TOM CAIAZZA Staff Writer When the dust settled on a particularly contentious Edison primary campaign June 5, Mayor Jun Choi's slate of political newcomers swept all four Democratic Party nominations for Township Council. The mayor's hand-picked slate beat out eight other contenders, including one slate of four sitting council members and one headed by former councilman and two-time mayoral candidate Bill Stephens. With roughly 49 percent of registered voters going to the polls, AnneMarie Griffin-Ussak was the leading vote-getter with 3,607 votes, followed by Dr. Sudhanshu Prasad, 3,500 votes, Melissa Perilstein, 3,486 votes, and Wayne Mascola, 3,389 votes. Council President Charles Tomaro was the leading vote-getter of the incumbent slate but trailed Mascola by more than 500 votes with 2,871. Out of the third slate, only Stephens was able to break the 2000 vote mark beating out two incumbent candidates with just over 2500 votes. Mascola said that as a newcomer he was a little surprised by the outcome but that he felt the real winners were the Edison taxpayers. He attributed the win to the public's desire for change. "I think the timing is right," Mascola said of the outcome, "I don't think it will be politics as usual." Politics as usual was the wave Choi and his slate rode to electoral victory citing several times during the campaign that the incumbent council were responsible for the township's overdevelopment problems. In one particularly interesting political event, a campaign staff member portrayed Councilman Rob Karabinchak as "Bob the Builder" to insinuate the council was in the pockets of developers. Stephens said that it was money and propaganda that drove this electoral win, not issues. "The new people, all they have to go by is the propaganda," Stephens said citing fliers and mailings that became a staple of this campaign. "It's going to become a rich man's game." Stephens said his slate had a strong, though unsuccessful showing which proves that their message was not ignored by the voters. "For us to be that close," Stephens said, "proves that people are aware we were there." But Stephens has no sour grapes. He said that the voters have spoken and that he will sit back and see how things progress - quickly he assumes. Election law bars him from challenging the slate as an independent in the fall, which Stephens has a history of doing, but said that he probably would have, if he had been allowed. Stephens rebuffed the notion that his slate took votes away from the incumbent slate and said that there would be no way to know if his supporters would have all gone incumbent. In fact, he thinks they wouldn't have gone at all. "I think the vast majority of people who supported me would have stayed home," Stephens said. "Most of the people who support me were against the incumbents." Council President Charles Tomaro will see his third term on the council be his last, for now, although he said he will not be far from Edison politics. "This is a bump in the road and we'll smooth that bump out, believe me," Tomaro said. He plans on working to reunite a very divided Democratic party in Edison, though he said he would not comment on how he would do that. "It's already started," Tomaro said, "it started the very next day." Tomaro said that harping on election day blues was not going to accomplish anything and he does not see this election as tainting his years of public service. "You look back at the good things that happened," Tomaro said, "and there is a lot that happened that was good for the community." He does not think the incumbents could have done anything different. "We couldn't have done anything different, couldn't have worked any harder," Tomaro said. "No one knocked on the doors that we knocked on. We handed out over 15,000 pieces of literature. We covered every district in the community. There is nothing more you could have done." Mascola said that if successful against Republicans in the November general election, he would not be a rubber stamp for the mayor's agenda. "We're not trying to build a political machine," Mascola said.