The state's election watchdog is back at it this week following months of turmoil.

The New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission held its first meeting since legislators passed a controversial new law revamping the campaign finance agency and its former commissioners resigned in protest, warning the new rules would weaken protections.

Well the four new members got right to work on Tuesday, formally voting to dismiss nearly half of the state's active alleged campaign finance violations.

Senior writer Colleen O'Dea is with me now for the latest.

Colleen.

Hey, good to see you.

Okay, so first question is, how many cases were dismissed and why were they thrown out?

So there were 107 cases that were dismissed.

And the reason they were dismissed is because they are more than two years old.

The law that passed earlier this year that Governor Murphy signed put a two year cap on the the length of time that you can go back and actually investigate it one of these allegations.

So some of these dated back, we were told, about ten years.

So they knew that this was going to have to happen.

Who did they involve or what type of allegations were involved in the cases that now are gone?

So we don't know most of the details.

We're supposed to get those hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

But we do know that they they definitely involved the there were some Republican leadership committees and also the Democratic Senate and Assembly leadership committees.

And and these are the groups that are trying desperately to get more either Democrats or Republicans in the legislature to control power there.

Yeah.

I'm curious about reaction to the fact that these cases were dismissed, because that was what we heard during the process of this legislation getting passed, especially from Republicans who said, hey, Democrats are among those who have a lot of these alleged violations waiting on this in this queue, I'll say.

So what was the reaction like after this meeting?

Yeah, I mean, you know, it was unfortunately that that we knew this was going to have to happen.

The law made it happen.

The Republicans didn't support the law, but the law is the law now.

So so these things had to happen.

And good government advocates also are not happy about this and a number of other changes in the law.

Okay.

I'm curious if Jeff Brindle, who has been the longtime executive director of ELEC, was present for the meeting and get us up to speed on whether or not he's out, he's in.

Where do we stand?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting.

Brindle has filed two lawsuits.

One is one was alleging that the Murphy administration and the governor in particular were trying to force him out.

The other one was trying to stop the law from being implemented.

So those are in court right now.

So it's kind of interesting to be in this lawsuit, but still be in your position.

Yeah.

I mean, what was the mood like?

Are commissioners, you know, taking him seriously.

So, you know, he did give his typical report, which was talking about some of the latest report that they've put out about committee spending.

He did make a comment at the beginning of his remarks saying that he was grateful to have a full slate of commissioners for the first time in many years, many years.

But at the same time, Thomas Prol, who is the new chairman of the commission, said made some veiled references in his comments about, you know, we're going to be open and we're going to treat everyone respectfully.

A reference, I think, to the email that kind of got Jeff Brindle in trouble emails where he made some remarks regarding the LGBTQ community.

Those were made public.

Governor Murphy moved to remove him from his position.

So how is this all going to play, Colleen?

We have an election coming up in November where all 120 legislators are on the ballot.

We now have a campaign finance agency that some say has been defanged.

So how is that going to work heading into November?

I think that all wait, you know, we just have to take a look and see.

The commissioners all essentially said yesterday that they are committed to enforcing the law and doing it fairly.

They did also issue, I think it was 16 notices to committees that filed reports late.

So that would seem to be a good sign that they're actually going to be trying to enforce the law and they're going to have to do it much more quickly than was done in the past.

Yeah, well, if you had cases lingering for ten years and now they put a cap on that, in some instances, that'll be a good thing.

Colleen O'Dea for us.

Colleen, thanks so much.

Thank you very much Bri.