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By Stacie Servetah
November 7, 2007

New Jersey voters rejected a ballot measure that would have dedicated all of the proceeds of last year's sales-tax increase to reducing the state's property taxes, the highest in the nation.

With 95 percent of precincts reporting, the proposal trailed 53 percent to 47 percent, according to results posted on the website of nj.com.

Governor Jon Corzine last year raised the sales tax to 7 percent from 6 percent. After a budget impasse that shut down state government for a week, Corzine agreed to put half of the proceeds from the increase toward property-tax relief. The measure defeated by voters yesterday would have dedicated the other half toward the same issue.

The amendment to the state constitution would have provided at least $1.4 billion a year to sustain property-tax cuts of as much as 20 percent, said Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts, who sponsored the measure.

The median property tax paid on a home in New Jersey was $5,773 in 2006, according to data from the Washington-based Tax Foundation. The second-highest median property tax was $4,136, in New Hampshire.

Separately, voters passed a revision to language in the constitution describing people who would be denied the right to vote. The amendment replaces the phrase ``idiot or insane person" with "a person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting."

Sponsored by Codey

Senate President Richard Codey, a mental-health advocate who sponsored the language change, said the measure would "erase more than 150 years of discrimination in New Jersey's constitution."

"By replacing the law that sanctions this insensitive language, we can hopefully erase the stigma attached to mental and cognitive disabilities," Codey, an Essex County Democrat, said in a statement earlier this year after the Senate passed the measure. "The fact that this language has remained in our constitution for so long is a disgrace."

To contact the reporter on this story: Stacie Servetah in Trenton, New Jersey, at sbabula@blooomberg.net