Republicans won the first round of the legal challenges to the extreme Democratic gerrymanders in New York, in a trial conducted in rural, upstate, deep-red Steuben County, on the border with central Pennsylvania. The real action was bound to come in the appeals court. Today, the intermediate state appellate court — the Appellate Division, Fourth Judicial Department, based in Rochester — upheld Judge Patrick McAllister’s ruling against the state’s slanted congressional map, giving the state legislature until April 30 to draw new maps. The appeals court, however, rejected Republican challenges to the state senate and state assembly maps, which were premised on challenges to the process used. Moreover, two of the five judges dissented even from the rejection of the obviously partisan congressional map. The case will go on to the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, where all the judges are Democratic appointees.
The Fourth Department’s opinion rested on the state constitutional ban (adopted in 2014) on partisan gerrymanders. New York’s map is, as I have noted previously, quite egregious. The New York Times quotes even Michael Li of the arch-liberal Brennan Center: “It’s very hard to defend a map like New York’s, and ultimately if it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.” The New York map had to eliminate a seat, so it is unsurprising that it combined two upstate Republican districts (NY-27, which was R+16 in the 2020 presidential election, and NY-24, which was Republican-held but D+9) into a single R+20 district based around moderate Republican John Katko. The map otherwise packed more Republicans into two districts, Andrew Gabarino’s Long Island–based NY-2 (R+4 to R+14) and Elise Stefanik’s NY-21, which went from R+10 to R+19.
But balanced against that, five districts swung dramatically toward Democrats:
NY-1 (Long Island Republican Lee Zeldin): R+4 to D+11, by draining Republicans into Gabarino’s district
NY-11 (Staten Island Republican Nicole Malliotakis): R+11 to D+10, by adding a bunch of Manhattan territory
NY-18 (lower-upstate Democrat Sean Maloney): D+5 to D+8
NY-19 (lower-upstate Democrat Antonio Delgado): D+1 to D+10
NY-22 (upstate Republican Claudia Tenney): R+11 to D+18
This was accomplished by a variety of truly bizarrely shaped districts. The Fourth Department credited the expert testimony by Sean Trende as proving a partisan map “as a factual matter beyond a reasonable doubt,” the highest standard of proof known in the law:
First, democratic leaders in the legislature drafted the 2022 congressional redistricting map without any republican input, and the map was adopted by the legislature without a single republican vote in favor of it. Second, under the 2012 congressional map there were 19 elected democrats and 8 elected republicans and under the 2022 congressional map there were 22 democrat-majority and 4 republican-majority districts…
Using the accepted computer program, Trende generated, inter alia, 5,000 simulated district maps for New York by randomly aggregating voting precincts, subject to certain criteria, to create the requisite 26 congressional districts. According to Trende, the simulated maps reflected what one would expect if maps had been drawn without respect to partisan criteria. . . . Trende concluded that the enacted congressional map pressed republican voters “into a few [r]epublican-leaning districts, while spreading [d]emocratic voters as efficiently as possible.” . . . As Trende testified, “[t]hat is the DNA of a gerrymander,” and the result is exactly what gerrymandering looks like, i.e., where the voters of the disfavored party are disproportionately “packed” into districts already favoring that party in order to make the districts around them either flip or become less competitive. . . . That pattern was reflected across all 26 congressional districts and was further supported by Trende’s other metrics of partisanship. . . . Although the 2022 congressional map created more republican-leaning districts than the majority of Trende’s simulated maps, the result of making the four republican-leaning districts less competitive in favor of republicans had, as Trende’s testimony and report explained, the effect of rendering the next most competitive nine districts less competitive in favor of democrats, consistent with a pattern of gerrymandering.