Gina LaPlaca, the former Democratic mayor of Lumberton Township, New Jersey, now faces criminal charges for allegedly submitting fraudulent signatures on her primary nominating petition, months after she pleaded guilty to driving drunk with her child in the car.
The Burlington County Prosecutor's Office announced Tuesday that LaPlaca, 47, and her husband Jason Carty, 49, were both charged in connection with false signatures on a petition meant to qualify LaPlaca for a Democratic primary race for the Lumberton Township Committee. Prosecutors said their investigation found that multiple people whose names and signatures appeared on the petition never signed it and never gave anyone permission to sign on their behalf.
Without those allegedly fabricated signatures, prosecutors said, LaPlaca would not have had enough valid names to qualify as a candidate. The couple is scheduled to appear in court September 21 in Mount Holly, New Jersey.
The petition was submitted by Carty to the Lumberton Township Municipal Clerk. It included an affidavit signed by LaPlaca herself. In that affidavit, Fox News reported, LaPlaca swore she had:
"personally circulated the petition [and] that such petition was signed by each of the signers thereof in his/her own handwriting."
Prosecutors painted a different picture. The Burlington County Prosecutor's Office stated:
"An investigation by the Prosecutor's Office revealed that multiple individuals whose names and purported signatures appeared on LaPlaca's nominating petition indicated they had neither signed the petition nor authorized anyone to do so on their behalf in support of the candidate's nomination."
LaPlaca faces four charges: making a false statement under oath, knowingly filing a false petition, tampering with public records, and falsifying or tampering with records. Carty faces three of the same charges, all except the false-statement-under-oath count, which ties directly to the affidavit LaPlaca signed.
Neither LaPlaca nor Carty has publicly responded to the charges.
The petition fraud charges land on top of a separate criminal case that already made LaPlaca a local disgrace. In March 2025, LaPlaca picked up her child from daycare while intoxicated. Witness video showed her vehicle swerving out of its lane and nearly hitting a utility pole.
Her blood alcohol concentration at the time of arrest registered at 0.30%, more than three times the legal limit of 0.08%. Bodycam footage captured LaPlaca admitting she had been drinking vodka before getting behind the wheel with her child.
She pleaded guilty earlier this year to DUI and child abuse charges. A judge sentenced her to three years of supervision under a pretrial intervention program, which includes mandatory attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The sentence kept her out of jail.
LaPlaca served as mayor of Lumberton Township from 2021 to 2025. After her mayoral term ended, she kept her seat on the township committee. That seat expires at the end of this year. Rather than step aside after the DUI conviction, she ran for re-election in the June Democratic primary, and finished third, behind Mayor Terrance Benson and his running mate Kendra Hatfield, in a contest for two open seats.
The Democratic Party's struggles with accountability at the local level are hardly confined to one New Jersey township. Across the country, prominent voices have called out Democrats for failing to confront problematic figures in their own ranks, whether the issue is ideology or conduct.
The most damaging detail in the prosecutor's announcement is the simplest one: without the disputed signatures, LaPlaca did not have enough valid names to get on the ballot. The alleged fraud was not incidental. It was, according to prosecutors, the only reason she qualified to run.
That means voters in the June primary may have been forced to share a ballot with a candidate who had no legitimate right to appear on it. LaPlaca lost anyway, but the integrity of the process was compromised regardless of the outcome.
The case echoes a broader pattern in Democratic politics, where competitive primaries have exposed fault lines over who the party elevates and how it polices its own candidates. In Lumberton, the party's local apparatus apparently did not catch, or did not stop, a candidate running on allegedly forged paperwork while under supervision for drunk driving with a child.
New Jersey law requires candidates to collect a minimum number of valid signatures from registered voters in their district to qualify for a primary ballot. The petition process exists to ensure that only candidates with genuine community support earn a spot. When signatures are fabricated, it is not a technicality. It is a direct assault on the mechanism that keeps elections honest.
The prosecutor's office has not disclosed exactly how many signatures were on the petition, how many were allegedly forged, or the precise number required to qualify. Those details may emerge when LaPlaca and Carty appear in court in September.
LaPlaca's fall has been swift by any measure. Four years ago, she held the top elected office in Lumberton Township. Now she is a twice-charged defendant, once for endangering her own child, and now for allegedly forging the paperwork that would have kept her political career alive.
The timeline raises uncomfortable questions about the local Democratic establishment. LaPlaca remained on the township committee after her DUI arrest. She remained on the committee after pleading guilty. She filed to run again. And the petition she submitted, the one prosecutors now say was built on fake signatures, apparently passed through the municipal clerk's office without triggering an immediate challenge.
Intra-party discipline has become a recurring theme among Democrats nationally. Some prominent Democrats have publicly warned that the party's reluctance to hold its own members accountable is eroding public trust. Lumberton is a small-town case, but the pattern is familiar.
Voters in this Burlington County community of roughly 12,000 people deserved better than a mayor who drove drunk at nearly four times the legal limit with a child in the backseat, and then, according to prosecutors, tried to stay in office by putting names on a petition that the actual people behind those names never agreed to.
The September 21 court date in Mount Holly will determine what comes next legally. But the political verdict is already in. LaPlaca lost her primary. Her committee term is expiring. And now she faces the prospect of a criminal trial on charges that go to the heart of election integrity, a subject both parties claim to care about, but one that only seems to matter when the other side gets caught.
When Democratic officials elsewhere face scrutiny over how they gained or held power, the standard response is to insist the system works. In Lumberton, the system worked only because prosecutors did their job after the fact. The local party did not police itself. The petition process did not catch the alleged fraud before the ballots were printed.
Election integrity is not a talking point. It is a promise that every signature on a petition, every name on a ballot, and every vote in a primary belongs to a real person who chose to participate. When that promise gets broken by the people who hold public office, the damage runs deeper than one lost race in one small town.
