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Election 2020
3 school board seats in play in Ewing The Ewing Township Board of Education will gain some new members next year, with just one incumbent running for the three seats that are up for grabs in the Nov. 3 election. Seven names will be on the ballot, including that of Channing Conway, who was elected to his first term in 2017. Also on the ballot are first-time candidates Matthew Canulli, Llionel Henderson, James C. McDaniel, Jennifer Miller, Tyrone Miller and Erin Rein. Two long-time members of the school board, Karen McKeon and Carl Benedetti, Jr., have opted not to run again. McKeon has been on the board since 2008, and Benedetti since 2011. The Ewing Observer continues its long tradition of publishing candidates’ answers to our questionnaires in advance of the election. Only five of the seven candidates on the ballot this year have responded. To read a brief biography of each of those four candidates, and their answers to our questions, please turn to page 16.
New Jersey joins growing list of states that are conducting elections by mail BY MICHELE ALPERIN
Ewing’s Darrel Frater is the founder and CEO of TheClub, an app that enables DJs to host livestreamed, public and private parties.
New live-streaming app aims to put DJs back in TheClub BY JOE EMANSKI
On May 2, NotOK app founders Charlie and Hannah Lucas and Twitter founder Jack Doresey collaborated to host the We Are Well virtual prom on Instagram Live. For two hours, students whose proms had been canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic got a chance dance the night away, alone and together at the same. NotOK and Dorsey gave away more than $45,000 in grants to students at the event, which was created to raise awareness for young
person wellness during the pandemic. DJ Jazzy Jeff was on the turntables. Darrel Frater took it all in. As vice president of growth and marketing for PromSocial, a year-old prom-planning app, Frater was more than an interested observer. He had also had the idea to host virtual proms as a marketing promotion for the app. He saw it as a networking opportunity and reached out to the Lucases. PromSocial helped with promotion and marketing for We Are Well, bringing in TikTok influencer Curtis Roach as one of the
celebrities who graced the virtual prom’s virtual red carpet. The success of the event inspired Frater, a long-time Ewing resident, to start up a new business: an app that has just gone live on Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Called TheClub, it is a live-streaming app that will enable DJs to host public and private parties digitally. “I’m friends with a lot of DJs, I know the pain points they’re going through with Covid,” Frater says. “All parties are shut down right now, and lots of them can’t even get See THE CLUB, Page 6
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In an atmosphere rife with misinformation and political divisiveness, confusing messages have spawned concerns about mail-in voting—a process that has proven safe and secure in the several states where it is now the norm. The western states of Utah, Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Colorado have for years conducted their elections entirely or mostly by mail-in ballot. New Jersey will join them for this year, after Gov. Phil Murphy issued Executive Order No. 177, mandating all active registered New Jersey voters receive a mail-in ballot with prepaid return postage for the Nov. 3 general election. Mercer County began mailing ballots to voters in the last week of September. This switch has not sat well with some, and disinformation about the process and safety of vote-at-home elections started to spread as a result. One piece of disinformation— one that could land voters in jail—came from President Donald Trump, who suggested to North Carolina citizens on Sept. 2 that they vote twice, once by mail and once at the polls, to test the security See VOTE, Page 7
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