Toms River Mayor Daniel Rodrick (File Photo)
An effort to recall Toms River Mayor Daniel Rodrick has failed – and the mayor said he sent private investigators to signing events and claims to have improper collections of signatures on tape. The committee behind the recall, for their part, said they fell just short of the required 18,464 signatures required to force a new election, but declined to publicly show the signature collection sheets.
Phil Brilliant, a member of the committee, said he and his partners collected 16,963 unverified signatures. Petition circulation commenced on Aug. 19, 2025, and concluded 160 days later in accordance with state law. The signatures are contained on 3,590 petition pages that remain “in our possession,” Brilliant said.
The announcement at Wednesday night’s township council meeting elicited one comment from Rodrick: “Show ’em!”
“Where are they?” he added, calling Brilliant a “scam artist,” which drew a response from Brilliant, a longtime sparring partner of the mayor at township meetings.
“I thought long and hard about walking in with over 3,500 petitions and laying them out for all to see,” Brilliant said. “But I asked myself a simple question: what would be gained by adding more theater to an already chaotic political world?”
Brilliant explained that he and fellow committee members decided at the outset of the signature collection effort that if the statutory minimum was not reached, the petitions would not be submitted for certification or review.
“From the beginning, this committee publicly committed that if the statutory minimum was not reached, the petition would not be submitted for verification to the clerk, a process that would have made every signature subject to public disclosure under the [Open Public Meetings Act],” Brilliant said.
Rodrick cast further doubt on the effort to recall him, stating he sent private investigators to events where signatures were collected, who allegedly recorded the mishandling of records and instances in which one person would have been allowed to sign for multiple other individuals. Rodrick did not release any of the recordings.
“The organizers were so desperate that they allowed the investigator to sign for people who weren’t present at every location—which is illegal,” Rodrick said in a letter to local Republicans, which he also excerpted at the meeting while delivering comments. “There is video evidence of recall committee members admitting they were nowhere near that number of signatures. If they had 17,000, they would have had to visit nearly every other house in Toms River. But no one came to your door or mine.”
Brilliant said it was natural that some signatures might not be valid.
“Some people from Pine Lake Park or Holiday City signed, believing they were residents,” he said.
Rodrick said internal polling showed his approval rating at about 66 percent, and touted spending cuts and a massive reduction in the number of mandated affordable housing units the township would need to provide after fighting the state’s original determination last year. He assailed his opponents for posting on social media forums what he viewed as misleading information, as well as AI-generated images that have inferred he was a Nazi. Last week, a popular anti-Rodrick social media group posted AI-generated images of township police cars with Rodrick’s name emblazoned on the side, fooling many followers into thinking they were real.
“This entire recall has been a hoax, perpetrated to delegitimize our accomplishments and our conservative record,” said Rodrick.
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