Court rules Democratic leaders gerrymandered districts, calls for postponing primaries

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UPDATED: April 27th, 2022 at 9:44 p.m.

The New York State Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Democratic leaders had gerrymandered certain districts, and it called for primary elections for congressional and state senate seats to be postponed until August.

The elections, originally scheduled to be held in June, will be pushed back so a court-appointed special master can redraw the disputed district lines, according to the decision filed in the New York Court of Appeals.

But the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., told Sarah Ferris of Politico that the postponement may not be allowed under federal law.

“(State law) requires a primary on June 28,” Maloney said. “Unless and until that federal court order is modified, the state needs to have a federal primary on June 28. The state decision ignores that fact. We think that’s a problem.”

The New York State Supreme Court’s decision did not mention whether the elections for New York governor or state assembly seats would also have to be postponed.

Judges scrapped proposed New York state electoral maps Thursday evening, siding with a Republican-backed lawsuit that accused Democratic legislators of gerrymandering.

The Appellate Division of the Fourth Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of New York gave a 3-2 ruling that struck down what it deemed to be electoral maps created with partisan bias. The court ruled that the procedure of the legislature, rather than the independent redistricting commission, devising the maps was not prohibited by state law.

Aside from the other arguments made in the suit, the court decided that the congressional map was unconstitutional because the districts were drawn in a manner that discouraged competition or demonstrated bias toward particular candidates or parties, the decision wrote.

The comparison between the proposed 2022 map and the 2012 redistricting map showed far more seats favoring Democrats than Republicans. The three judges who sided with the Republican-backed suit agreed with this evidence — along with the lack of Republican support for the new maps and the expert opinion and supporting analysis of Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics — was enough to prove the partisan intent of the map-drawing process.

Trende testified the evidence has the “DNA of a gerrymander,” and the result is “exactly what gerrymandering looks like,” the ruling stated.

The gerrymander had disproportionately packed voters that favored the Republican party into fewer districts to either flip a seat to the Democratic party or make seats that already favor one party less competitive, the decision wrote.

The two dissenting judges said there were flaws in Trende’s computer model demonstrating that the new electoral map had been gerrymandered.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and other legislators are expected to appeal the ruling to the New York Court of Appeals — the highest court in the state — according to the New York Times. A ruling is expected to come as soon as this week.

The Court of Appeals’ Wednesday ruling was decided four to three in favor of striking down the Democrat-drawn district lines.

In one of the three dissenting opinions written by Judge Jenny Rivera, she argued that the Appellate Division’s decision should have been reversed because the petitioners failed to prove the maps substantively violated state constitutional law.

The Court of Appeals’ decision is not subject to appeal, the New York Times reported.