New Jersey Democrats pressed Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli to concede last week's election, saying that his silence since the race was called for Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy is "an assault on the integrity of our elections." 

Ciattarelli's campaign did not immediately respond to the accusation from Murphy's reelection campaign. The former state legislator has not spoken about the results since Thursday, when he called Murphy's declaration of victory "premature" and said he would wait for clarity. He had not been in contact with the Democratic campaign.

"The race is over," Murphy campaign manager Mollie Binotto said in a statement. "Assemblyman Ciattarelli is mathematically eliminated, and he must accept the results and concede the race. His continuing failure to do so is an assault on the integrity of our elections."

As of Monday morning, Murphy led the Republican by roughly 2.6 percentage points, larger than the margin Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, won by last week. Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe conceded that race on Nov. 3, the morning after the election, and Youngkin soon began the transition process by meeting with the state's Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam.

"No one should be declaring victory or conceding the election until every legal vote is counted," Ciattarelli said in a video statement posted on Thursday evening, when the unofficial vote count put Murphy ahead by around two points. The Associated Press called the race for Murphy before that, after hundreds of thousands of mail ballots broke heavily for the first-term Democrat.

The Republican is not the only New Jersey candidate who has yet to concede Tuesday's elections. State Senate President Steve Sweeney, who is running more than 2,000 votes behind Republican challenger Edward Durr in the latest vote count, told the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday that he would wait until "every vote is counted" before making his decision. As of Monday morning, Durr led Sweeney by 3.2 percentage points.

The AP called the race for Durr last week, and the Republican has been preparing to take office, apologizing for some social media posts about Islam, vaccines and the 2020 election, which Democrats only drew attention to after Sweeney's apparent defeat.

Like Sweeney, both the Ciattarelli and Murphy campaigns have pointed out that more ballots remained to be counted after Tuesday. Mail ballots postmarked by Nov. 2 may be counted if they arrive by 8 p.m. Monday - six full days after polls closed on election night. Voters whose mail ballots were rejected for errors have until Nov. 13 to correct them.

On Monday, the Murphy campaign estimated the amount of affected ballots at around 2,800, compared with his lead of more than 65,000 votes.

Across the state, there are also tens of thousands of uncounted provisional ballots, cast by voters who could not prove their eligibility at the polls, but have several days to verify it. The Murphy campaign estimated that less than 58,000 such ballots had been cast, smaller than the margin separating them from Ciattarelli. As of Monday morning, more than 2.5 million votes had been counted.

"The vote-by-mail ballots overwhelmingly favor Governor Murphy (and will continue to do so)," Binotto said in her memo, published on Monday. "And there are not enough provisional ballots to erase Governor Murphy's lead."

The AP did not call the gubernatorial race for Murphy until Wednesday evening, and did not project Sweeney's defeat until late Thursday morning. But confusion over mail and provisional ballots is not new in state elections. In 2020, the AP called the race in the 7th Congressional District for Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski on Nov. 4. Republican challenger Tom Kean Jr. did not concede until 15 days later, as late-arriving mail ballots broke his way and tightened the margin.

Mail ballots in this year's New Jersey races were more favorable for Democratic candidates - which has stoked some conservative chatter about a stolen election. After mail ballots were counted in Bergen County, a part of north Jersey where Ciattarelli had narrowly won the Election Day vote, Murphy pushed ahead there, a pattern that repeated across the state.

In some GOP forums, like nearly 50,000-member Facebook group AuditNJ, Ciattarelli supporters argued that something suspicious was underway. The main focus of speculation: How more Democratic votes could have arrived after media outlets said that 100 percent of in-person precincts had finished reporting. Those counts did not include mail ballots, a fact lost in some post-election speculation.

"We need to know EXACTLY what happened at 1:54am in Bergen County," tweeted Tricia Flanagan, a Republican activist running for the party's nomination in the 3rd Congressional District currently held by Democratic Rep. Andy Kim, referring to the moment when the mail ballots, which had tabulated on the official county elections cite, were added to the AP count.

Ciattarelli did not comment on any of the speculation and has not said what he might do after the final ballots are counted this weekend. New Jersey has no threshold for automatic recounts, and no race for governor has gone to a recount since 1981, when the Democratic and Republican nominees were separated by fewer than 2,000 votes out of 2.3 million cast.

To ask for a recount, Ciattarelli and Sweeney would rely on the same state law: Candidates or supporters must file lawsuits by Nov. 19 and must "believe that an error has been made." If the recount does not reverse the result or find large errors, such as a count off by more than 1%, the party that requested the recount must pay for having it conducted.

Republicans gained seats in both Houses of the New Jersey state legislature on Tuesday, but Democrats retained their majorities. Democrats in Trenton have already begun the process of choosing a state Senate president, assuming that Sweeney will be out of office when his term ends on Jan. 11.