Nassau legislative district deadline looms

The fight over Nassau legislative districts turned this week into a tangled and tantalizing game of political "chicken," operatives on both sides say.

Thursday comes the deadline for candidates to file their petitions for places on the November ballot.

This deadline arrives under bizarre circumstances.

A state judge is due to rule -- after the fact -- on which set of district lines apply to the 19 seats at stake in the election. That is, Democratic Justice Steve Jaeger will not hear final arguments in the partisan court fight until Friday, with a ruling and very possibly an appeal to follow -- all after the petitions he's deciding on are submitted.

"You are going to have a mess," predicted an election attorney who's not involved.

Election cases are usually argued on an expedited calendar to avoid such absurdities as someone being disqualified from the ballot after the vote is over. But court officials say this case was not at first considered an election case -- perhaps one reason it will be decided too late to affect what candidates chose to collect and hand in.

The question for Nassau now becomes: How can anyone invest confidence in petitions signed by registered party members of a district -- until the borders of that district are resolved?

A key part of the lingering litigation concerns whether the county charter calls for redistricting this year or next. Democratic candidates filed petitions this week with the county election board, based on the map they like better -- the one used after the 2000 U.S. Census.

Republicans had yet to file their petitions Tuesday. Their candidates are said to have carried two sets of petitions -- one along these old lines and another based on the party's preferred map.

The GOP, controlling the county executive's office and the legislative majority, drew up and put that second map into law. Republicans predict it will hold up in court. The map sticks four Democratic incumbents into two districts.

One Democratic strategist, who asked not to be identified, conceded the Republicans already have come out ahead, in a sense. "They've done a good job of making our guys anxious," the operative said. "We're talking to you guys about this -- as opposed to, 'How many doors did you knock on today?' "

But a Republican strategist said it is the Democrats who have been stalling, raising what he called "nonsense" technical objections to the metes and bounds in the maps.

All this may look a bit like the political version of two cars heading toward each other at full speed. The gap between them is closing, which is what playing "chicken" is all about.